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:
- How I Walked Alone in the Jungles of Heaven by Vachel Lindsay
- Sonnet 05
- Вера Павлова – Попытка не пытка
- Reply to a Trimming Epistle, received from a Tailor by Robert Burns
- Vacant Lot With Pokeweed poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
- Down By The Salley Gardens by William Butler Yeats
- Places and Men by William Allingham
- Robert Burns: Address To The Deil:
- Robert Burns: Clarinda, Mistress Of My Soul:
- Омар Хайям – Лучше пить и веселых красавиц ласкать
- Владимир Высоцкий – За окном только вьюга, смотри
- Dialogue Song—Philly and Willy by Robert Burns
- Mummy, mummy who invented school? by Raj Arumugam
- Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning
- Владимир Британишский – На конференции молодых геофизиков
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
- November by William Cullen Bryant
- Mutation by William Cullen Bryant
- Love and Folly by William Cullen Bryant
- June by William Cullen Bryant
- Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood by William Cullen Bryant
- William Cullen Bryant – William Cullen Bryant
- Hymn To Death by William Cullen Bryant
- Hymn of the City by William Cullen Bryant
- Consumption by William Cullen Bryant
- After a Tempest by William Cullen Bryant
- A Song of Pitcairn’s Island by William Cullen Bryant
- A Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryant
- William Henry Davies
- The Example by William Henry Davies
- The Dark Hour by William Henry Davies
- The Child and the Mariner by William Henry Davies
- The Boy by William Henry Davies
- The Bird of Paradise by William Henry Davies
- The Best Friend by William Henry Davies
- Sweet Stay-at-Home by William Henry Davies
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
