A poem by Alan Dugan
What is better than leaving a bar
in the middle of the afternoon
besides staying in it or not
having gone into it in the first place
because you had a decent woman to be with?
The air smells particularly fresh
after the stale beer and piss smells.
You can stare up at the whole sky:
it’s blue and white and does not
stare back at you like the bar mirror,
and there’s Whats-‘is-name coming out
right behind you saying, “I don’t
believe it, I don’t believe it: there
he is, staring up at the fucking sky
with his mouth open. Don’t
you realize, you stupid son of a bitch,
that it is a quarter to four
and we have to clock in in
fifteen minutes to go to work?”
So we go to work and do no work
and can even breathe in the Bull’s face
because he’s been into the other bar
that we don’t go to when he’s there.
A few random poems:
- Aplolgia Pro Vita Sua by Samuel Coleridge
- Sonnet 118: Like as to make our appetite more keen by William Shakespeare
- The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
- Love’s Fitfulness poem – Alfred Austin
- Beautiful City poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Humayun To Zobeida (From the Urdu) by Sarojini Naidu
- Olney Hymn 59: A Living And A Dead Faith by William Cowper
- When Day Is Done by Rabindranath Tagore
- Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight by Vachel Lindsay
- Book Tenth {Residence in France continued] by William Wordsworth
- The Ineffectual Dives by Shahida Latif
- Eidólons. by Walt Whitman
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Светлая заутреня
- Владимир Британишский – По Иртышу
- The Lament Of The Old Nurse
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
- Ольга Берггольц – Слышала, приедешь к нам не скоро ты
- Ольга Берггольц – Синеглазый мальчик, синеглазый
- Ольга Берггольц – Сибиринка
- Ольга Берггольц – Сестре
- Ольга Берггольц – Родине
- Ольга Берггольц – Разговор с соседкой
- Ольга Берггольц – Простите бедность этих строк
- Ольга Берггольц – Придешь, как приходят слепые
- Ольга Берггольц – Потеряла я вечером слово
- Ольга Берггольц – Порука
- Ольга Берггольц – Полуночная
- Ольга Берггольц – Покуда небо сумрачное меркнет
- Ольга Берггольц – Подбирают фомки и отмычки
- Ольга Берггольц – Письмо из Ленинграда
- Ольга Берггольц – Песня о жене патриота
- Ольга Берггольц – Песня о ленинградской матери
- Ольга Берггольц – Песня дочери
- Ольга Берггольц – Первое письмо на Каму
- Ольга Берггольц – Пахнет соснами, гарью, тленьем
- Ольга Берггольц – Память (Всей земною горечью и болью)
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.