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:
- Vows
- Poem on Sensibility by Robert Burns
- Низами Гянджеви – В ночи я знаю
- My Bed is Covered Yellow by Peter Orlovsky
- Владимир Британишский – На берегу
- emotional bond by Raj Arumugam
- The Voice poem – Andree Chedid poems | Poems and Poetry
- Владимир Британишский – Далекая скрипка
- Termites by Piera Chen
- Владимир Маяковский – Тексты “окон”, переработанные для сборника “Грозный смех”
- Epistle to Major Logan by Robert Burns
- Robert Burns: A Winter Night :
- night_piece.html
- Thou and You poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Владислав Ходасевич – Ни розового сада
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
- A Big Idea? by Satish Verma
- Twice Shy by Seamus Heaney
- The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney
- The Perch by Seamus Heaney
- The Otter by Seamus Heaney
- The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
- The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney
- The Early Purges by Seamus Heaney
- Testimony by Seamus Heaney
- Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
- Song by Seamus Heaney
- Rite of Spring by Seamus Heaney
- Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney
- Postscript by Seamus Heaney
- Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
- Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication by Seamus Heaney
- Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
- Lovers on Aran by Seamus Heaney
- Limbo by Seamus Heaney
- Keeping Going by Seamus Heaney
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