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:
- Sonnet CVII: Not Mine Own Fears, Nor the Prophetic Soul by William Shakespeare
- Manure by Mark R Slaughter
- Epistle to Major Logan by Robert Burns
- Orlando Furioso Canto 5 by Ludovico Ariosto
- To the Right Hon. Lady Anne Coventry by William Somervile
- So tired by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Ethiopia Saluting the Colors. by Walt Whitman
- Death by William Butler Yeats
- A Lover’s Complaint by William Shakespeare
- Ages and Ages, Returning at Intervals. by Walt Whitman
- The Lion by Vachel Lindsay
- Death Of Captain Cooke, by William Lisle Bowles
- Николай Гумилев – Маргарита
- A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost
- The True Use of the Looking-Glass by William Somervile
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
- New Year’s Dawn – Broadway by Sara Teasdale
- In Memoriam F.O.S. by Sara Teasdale
- Madeira From The Sea by Sara Teasdale
- In David’s “Child’s Garden Of Verses” by Sara Teasdale
- Love In Autumn by Sara Teasdale
- In a Subway Station by Sara Teasdale
- Less Than The Cloud To The Wind by Sara Teasdale
- In A Restaurant by Sara Teasdale
- Interlude: Songs Out Of Sorrow by Sara Teasdale
- In A Railroad Station by Sara Teasdale
- In The Train by Sara Teasdale
- In A Garden by Sara Teasdale
- In The Metropolitan Museum by Sara Teasdale
- In A Cuban Garden by Sara Teasdale
- In The End by Sara Teasdale
- In the Carpenter’s Shop by Sara Teasdale
- In Spring, Santa Barbara by Sara Teasdale
- In Memoriam F.O.S. by Sara Teasdale
- In David’s “Child’s Garden Of Verses” by Sara Teasdale
- In a Subway Station by Sara Teasdale
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.