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:
- In A Station Of The Metro poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Гавриил Державин – Храповицкому (Храповицкий! дружбы знаки)
- Apology to Delia by William Cowper
- In The Bazaars of Hyderabad by Sarojini Naidu
- Devonshire Street W.1 poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
- Lune de Miel by T. S. Eliot
- The City That Will Not Repent by Vachel Lindsay
- At San Giovanni Del Lago poem – Alfred Austin
- Вера Звягинцева – Всхожу на мост
- A Port Of Refuge Agleam With The Aura Of Love by Walter William Safar
- Flying Home by Sudeep Sen
- If It Is True What the Prophets Write by William Blake
- Fragment—Her Flwoing Locks by Robert Burns
- Зинаида Александрова – Давайте, девочки, купаться
- Always Unsuitable by Marge Piercy
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
- Conviction (iii) by Stevie Smith
- Conviction (ii) by Stevie Smith
- Conviction (i) by Stevie Smith
- Bag-Snatching In Dublin by Stevie Smith
- Away, Melancholy by Stevie Smith
- Autumn by Stevie Smith
- Alone In The Woods by Stevie Smith
- The Triangle by Subhash Misra
- The Last Summer by Subhash Misra
- The Grammar Lesson by Steve Kowit
- The dawn by Sukumaran Devarajan
- Some Clouds by Steve Kowit
- Scribbles by Suchi Gaur
- Rainbow Hues by Suchi Gaur
- Purple Heart Liz (My Girl At Woodstock) by Steve Sant
- Notice by Steve Kowit
- Must Work by Steve Downes
- Lifetime Of Death by Steve Sant
- In The Chapel Of Rest by Steve Sant
- I Had To Leave by Subhash Misra
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
