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:
- To the Victor by William Ellery Leonard
- This Will Not Win Him by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Granny
- A Greek Girl poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been by William Shakespeare
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Смерть в Мессине
- Plato
- Lycidas poem – John Milton poems
- Низами Гянджеви – В привычке сердца воровать ты
- Oh Stay At Home, My Lad poem – A. E. Housman
- “The flower, full blown, now bends the stalk, now breaks” poem – Alfred Austin
- The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
- The Land of Counterpane by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Worlds Greatest Smoke Off by Shel Silverstein
- The Realists by William Butler Yeats
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
- Sweetheart by M. T. Metutera
- Sweet Fire by Samuel Stephen Wakdok
- Summer by Luther Seahand
- Sonnet # 9 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 8 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 7 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 6 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 4 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 21 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 2 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 19 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 18 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 17 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 15 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 14 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 13 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 12 by Luis A. Estale
- Sonnet # 11 by Luis A. Estable
- Sonnet # 10 by Luis A. Estable
- So Soon Done! by Luis Estable
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.