‘Twas long ago, in the summer-time,
On a day as sad as this,
That I laid my babe in its father’s arms,
And he gave it his farewell kiss;
When the army sail’d from the English shores
In a mist of sun and rain,
To the vine-clad hills and citadels
And the olive groves of Spain.
I set my face to the balmy south,
And listen’d, intent and dumb,
As though a cry from the battle-grounds
On the fragrant wind might come.
I yearn’d for a gleam of the red camp fires
Which burn’d through the watchful nights,
For the shine of the bayonets that clash’d one day
On the dread Albuera heights.
Ah me! And my face cannot turn away,
Though the ashes are on my brow,-
Though the news of the battle came once for all,
And there’s nothing to watch for now!
Though ’tis further away than that far south land
I must look for my dear man’s face,-
Though I know he will never come home again
To the chair in the old house-place!
A few random poems:
- Lying Down by Robert Desnos
- Владимир Маяковский – Расчистка пути (РОСТА)
- Bridge-Guard in the Karroo by Rudyard Kipling
- market_square.html
- The Little Big Man by Rabindranath Tagore
- How To Achieve Self-Realization, The Mother of All Knowledge?
- MY BEST PAL by Steve Troyanovich
- Synchronicity by Marina Cecilia Kohon
- A Song at Cock-Crow by Rudyard Kipling
- A Good Play by Robert Louis Stevenson
- NIGHT RAID by Satish Verma
- Robert Burns: The Rantin’ Dog, The Daddie O’t:
- National Trust by Tony Harrison
- Laila and the Khalifa by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Dead by Sylvia Plath
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
- Hope And Riders
- Do I
- Communal War
- Blank Dreams
- Before
- Again
- A Voice
- A Toast To Nations
- What Of The Night
- Vows
- To Morrow
- The Winged Mariners
- The Watchman
- The Virgin Martyr
- The Vain Question
- The Soldiers Grave
- The Silence In The Church
- The Season
- The Resting Place
- The Old Manor House
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

Ada Cambridge (1844 – 1926), also known as Ada Cross, was an English-born Australian author and poetess. She wrote more than 25 works of fiction, three volumes of poetry and two autobiographical works.