A poem by Alan Seeger (1888-1916)
Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold,
Thou wert sometime the garden of a king.
The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing.
The flowers are few. It was not so of old.
It was not thus when hand in hand there strolled
Through arbors perfumed with undying Spring
Bare bodies beautiful, brown, glistening,
Decked with green plumes and rings of yellow gold.
Do you suppose the herdsman sometimes hears
Vague echoes borne beneath the moon’s pale ray
From those old, old, far-off, forgotten years?
Who knows? Here where his ancient kings held sway
He stands. Their names are strangers to his ears.
Even their memory has passed away.
A few random poems:
- Lover’s Gifts XIX: It Is Written in the Book by Rabindranath Tagore
- Нина Гаген-Торн – Колыма
- Владимир Набоков – Шахматный конь
- One Sweeps By. by Walt Whitman
- Владимир Корнилов – Погодинка
- Confused and Distraught by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Dead Men’s Love by Rupert Brooke
- Алишер Навои – О таинствах любви
- Lukannon by Rudyard Kipling
- The Sea and the Shadow by Paul Blackburn
- Виктор Калитин – Фиалка
- Threshold by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Dragon & The Undying by Siegfried Sassoon
- Dust of Snow by Robert Frost
- A Kiss by Thomas Lux
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
- Swing Shift Blues
- Remembering An Account Executive
- Prison Song
- Portrait From The Infantry
- Plague Of Dead Sharks
- On Looking For Models
- On The Civil War On The East Coast Of The United States Of North America 1860 64
- On Hurricane Jackson
- On Being A Householder
- On A Seven Day Diary
- Nomenclature
- Monologue Of A Commercial Fisherman
- Internal Migration On Being On Tour
- Internal Migration Being Tour
- How We Heard The Name
- Fabrication Of Ancestors
- Elegy
- Drunken Memories Of Anne Sexton
- Civil War East Coast United States North America 1860 64
- Against A Sickness To The Female Double Principle God
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 Seeger (1888-1916) was an American war poet who fought and died in World War I during the Battle of the Somme, serving in the French Foreign Legion. Seeger was the brother of Charles Seeger, a noted American pacifist and musicologist and the uncle of folk musician, Pete Seeger.