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:
- Afternoon Rain in State Street poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- My Father’s Hats by Mark Irwin
- Wraiths by Siegfried Sassoon
- Astrophel and Stella: LXXI by Sir Philip Sidney
- Hey birds by Raj Arumugam
- A Thing of Beauty (Endymion) poem – John Keats poems
- Ballad of the Goodly Fere poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Brookland Road by Rudyard Kipling
- Ballade Of The Dead Cities poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Your Dream
- Journey Of Life by Nikhil Srinivas
- Ольга Берггольц – Синеглазый мальчик, синеглазый
- The Lent Lily by A. E. Housman
- Иван Мятлев – Старушка
- Константин Батюшков – Мои пенаты
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
- Vorticism Is A Choka In Its Modular Home
- Violets Beauty Passing
- Victor
- Untitled
- Traveling
- Tracks In The Private Country
- Thoughts Religious Content
- The World
- The Sacred Tree
- The Poet And Imagination
- The Holy Tree
- The Emigrant
- Tears
- Simple Heart
- Silence
- She
- Sealed Appropriate
- Seal
- Sea Salt A Villanelle
- Salamis Quot
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.