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:
- One Hour to Madness and Joy. by Walt Whitman
- Robert Burns: Birthday Ode For 31st December, 1787:
- Sonet 58 by William Alexander
- Occupy the Wall Street by Sunil Sharma
- Robert Burns: On Scaring Some Water-Fowl In Loch-Turit : A wild scene among the Hills of Oughtertyre.
- The Story Of Our Lives by Mark Strand
- Ecologue IX by Virgil
- In the Nower poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- Do You Know What Its Like
- My Father’s Hats by Mark Irwin
- On Hearing The Bag-Pipe And Seeing “The Stranger” Played At Inverary poem – John Keats poems
- Stop Looking For Broken Heart Poems and Quotes and Win Your Ex Back Instead!
- Doctors by Rudyard Kipling
- Наум Коржавин – Осень в Караганде
- Robert Burns: Epitaph On A Noted Coxcomb: Capt. Wm. Roddirk, of Corbiston.
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
- discovery.html
- day_dream.html
- cocoon_for_a_skeleton.html
- cinema_screen.html
- chaplin.html
- Cats by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
- black_on_black.html
- black_morning_lovesong.html
- birch_tree.html
- betrayal.html
- bells_pool_and_sleep.html
- attack_on_the_ad_man.html
- any_man_speaks.html
- woken_up_by_beautiful_dreams.html
- was_then.html
- vestiges.html
- un-chien-andalou-an-andalusian-dog.html
- the_poet_angels_who_came_to_dinner.html
- the_nomad039s_vision_ode_to_a_skylark_dressed_in_black.html
- the_man_that_poetry_made.html
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
