The Children Look At The Parents
by A. S. J. Tessimond
We being so hidden from those who
Have quietly borne and fed us,
How can we answer civilly
Their innocent invitations?
How can we say “we see you
As but-for-God’s-grace-ourselves, as
Our caricatures (we yours), with
Time’s telescope between us”?
How can we say “you presumed on
The accident of kinship,
Assumed our friendship coatlike,
Not as a badge one fights for”?
How say “and you remembered
The sins of our outlived selves and
Your own forgiveness, buried
The hatchet to slow music;
Shared money but not your secrets;
Will leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems”?
How say all this without capitals,
Italics, anger or pathos,
To those who have seen from the womb come
Enemies? How not say it?

A few random poems:
- Robert Burns: Nature’s Law – A Poem: Humbly inscribed to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.
- Across the Street from the Whitmore Home for Girls, 1949 by Rachel McKibbens
- Hemingwayan waves of time by Ndue Ukaj
- Listen To The Mustn’ts by Shel Silverstein
- The Rose Of The World by William Butler Yeats
- The Gardener LXVIII: None Lives For Ever, Brother by Rabindranath Tagore
- Us Two by AA Milne
- Stream And Sun At Glendalough by William Butler Yeats
- Наум Коржавин – На побывке
- Live for the moment, be in the present by Ramesh V Deshpande
- Love is Immortal poem – Amy Haritha Suseel poems | Poems and Poetry
- Beautiful Women. by Walt Whitman
- The Ever-Patient Woman poem – Andree Chedid poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Monastery Of Life by Vaishnavi Prakash
- Владимир Маяковский – Письмо к любимой Молчанова, брошенной им
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
- I Dream I M The Death Of Orpheus
- From An Atlas Of The Difficult World
- From A Survivor
- Fox
- For This
- For The Record
- For The Dead
- Final Notions
- Diving Into The Wreck
- Diving Wreck
- Cartographies Of Silence
- Burning Oneself Out
- Aunt Jennifer039s Tigers
- Aunt Jennifers Tigers
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- The Ugly Little Bird
- Poems.html 0
- Mountain Wellhead
- In The Bus That Is Frantically Rushing From Cairo To Port Said
- Youth
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