A poem by Alan Dugan
The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water,
rearing to escape me. Where could it find another
animal as naked as the one it hates to cover?
Once it told me what was happening outside,
who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air
was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up
dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance,
or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone.
It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know
with, and other armor, better girded to my wish.
So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave:
sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts
the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell
is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors
labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through
its arching guard! But even in the night it jails,
with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon,
the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs,
and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.

A few random poems:
- Вероника Тушнова – Я стою у открытой двери
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Когда бы
- The Dunciad: Book II. poem – Alexander Pope
- On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac by William Butler Yeats
- On a Forenoon of Spring by William Allingham
- Николай Языков – Переезд через приморские Альпы
- Afterwards by Thomas Hardy
- The Storm by Rainbow Reed
- Олег Бундур – Бесконечность
- The Gate by Marie Howe
- Владимир Вишневский – Тем, что в женщине разбудишь
- Blizzard by William Carlos Williams
- Song—O can ye Labour Lea? by Robert Burns
- Sonnet IX by William Shakespeare
- At Oxford by William Lisle Bowles
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Far In a Western Brookland poem – Alfred Edward Housman
- Far In a Western Brookland poem – Alfred Edward Housman
- Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries poem – A. E. Housman
- Could Man Be Drunk Forever poem – A. E. Housman
- Bring, In This Timeless Grave To Throw poem – A. E. Housman
- Bredon Hill poem – A. E. Housman
- As Through the Wild Green Hills of Wyre poem – A. E. Housman
- Along the field as we came poem – A. E. Housman
- The Haymakers’ Song poem – Alfred Austin
- Love’s Blindness poem – Alfred Austin
- At His Grave poem – Alfred Austin
- Agatha poem – Alfred Austin
- Loves Blindness
- The Haymakers Song
- Loves Blindness
- At His Grave
- Agatha
- Why
- Where Are You
- Tell Me
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.