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:
- Михаил Лермонтов – Арфа
- Lovers by Siegfried Sassoon
- Огюст Барбье – Шекспир
- Robert Burns: The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation To His Auld Mare, Maggie: On giving her the accustomed ripp of corn to hansel in the New Year.
- Степан Щипачев – Не громок, не бросок мой стих
- zen: a very short history by Raj Arumugam
- The Invisible by Rixa White
- Rosslyn To The Prime Minister by Graham Rowlands
- Владимир Орлов – Как Таппи научился лаять
- Robert Burns: Elegy On “Stella”: The following poem is the work of some hapless son of the Muses who deserved a better fate. There is a great deal of “The voice of Cona” in his solitary, mournful notes; and had the sentiments been clothed in Shenstone’s language, they would have been no discredit even to that elegant poet.-R.B.
- Last Curtain by Rabindranath Tagore
- Leopard by Stanley Wilkin
- Stillborn by Sylvia Plath
- Psalm 08 poem – John Milton poems
- Владимир Высоцкий – Говорят, лезу прямо под нож
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
