by Agha Shahid Ali
First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn’t wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn’t speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn’t I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn’t know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn’t have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you’ll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end.
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages
Copyright ©:
1987, SUN-Gemini Press
A few random poems:
- Владислав Крапивин – Рыжий конь
- Epigram on Parting with a kind Host in the Highlands by Robert Burns
- simple_heart.html
- Les Roses de Sâdi poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Sonnet 44: If the dull substance of my flesh were thought by William Shakespeare
- A Tale, Founded On A Fact, Which Happened In January, 1779 by William Cowper
- The Rhyme of the Three Captains by Rudyard Kipling
- The Fallen Elm poem – Alfred Austin
- Couplet 2 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Чудом тени
- Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
- Ballade Made In The Hot Weather by William Ernest Henley
- Владимир Маяковский – В Европе кризис (РОСТА №869)
- Amarene by Rina Ferrarelli
- Владимир Маяковский – Праздник урожая
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
- Westward on the High-Hilled Plains poem – A. E. Housman
- Wake Not for the World-Heard Thunder poem – A. E. Housman
- Tis Time, I Think, By Wenlock Town poem – A. E. Housman
- Tis Time, I Think, By Wenlock Town poem – A. E. Housman
- Think No More, Lad poem – A. E. Housman
- Think No More, Lad poem – A. E. Housman
- There Pass the Careless People poem – A. E. Housman
- There Pass the Careless People poem – A. E. Housman
- The Winds Out of the West Land Blow poem – A. E. Housman
- The Winds Out of the West Land Blow poem – A. E. Housman
- The Welsh Marches poem – A. E. Housman
- The Welsh Marches poem – A. E. Housman
- The True Lover poem – A. E. Housman
- The Street Sounds to the Soldiers’ Tread poem – A. E. Housman
- The Stinging Nettle poem – A. E. Housman
- The Stinging Nettle poem – A. E. Housman
- The Recruit poem – A. E. Housman
- The Recruit poem – A. E. Housman
- The rainy Pleiads wester poem – A. E. Housman
- The rainy Pleiads wester poem – A. E. Housman
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
