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:
- Николай Гумилев – Она говорила
- He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge by William Butler Yeats
- Наум Коржавин – Нелепые ваши затеи
- Chungnan by Wang Wei
- Константин Бальмонт – Мы прячем, душим тонкой сетью лжи
- The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Some Say by Mark Miller
- King And No King by William Butler Yeats
- Владимир Высоцкий – Вова испугался
- Robert Burns: Go On, Sweet Bird, And Sooth My Care:
- A Conversation At Dawn by Thomas Hardy
- Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns’s Country poem – John Keats poems
- Eclogue V by Virgil
- The Language of William Dunbar
- Tenuous And Precarious by Stevie Smith
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
- From The Frontier Of Writing by Seamus Heaney
- Follower by Seamus Heaney
- Exposure by Seamus Heaney
- Docker by Seamus Heaney
- Death Of A Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
- Casualty by Seamus Heaney
- Bogland by Seamus Heaney
- Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney
- Act of Union by Seamus Heaney
- Winters!!! by Aditya Kumar
- The Lent Lily by A. E. Housman
- Winters!!! by Aditya Kumar
- On the Idle Hill of Summer by A. E. Housman
- The Lent Lily by A. E. Housman
- On the Idle Hill of Summer by A. E. Housman
- Broken wings of a Heart by Saajida Gora
- Being Underwater by Sahiti Siddharth
- Awake by Sara Herlihy
- Attitude: Don Juan in the Shopping Mall by S. K. Kelen
- Aspirations by SAAJIDA GORA
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
