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:
- Midsummer Mobile by Sylvia Plath
- Николай Заболоцкий – Начало зимы
- A Leaf for Hand in Hand. by Walt Whitman
- Golden Eangle
- Владимир Гиппиус стихи: читать все стихотворения, поэмы поэта Владимир Гиппиус – Поэзия на Poetry Monster
- Владимир Корнилов – Яблоки
- Виктор Гончаров – Прощайте, спасибо
- Николай Огарев – Я сорвал ветку кипариса
- The Twelve poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Apology poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Владимир Костров – Поэтессе
- Sonnet 127: In the old age black was not counted fair by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet. If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain’d poem – John Keats poems
- Олег Бундур – Кто делает весну?
- The Tears of Scotland by Tobias Smollett
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
- A Prayer For Old Age by William Butler Yeats
- A Prayer For My Son by William Butler Yeats
- A Nativity by William Butler Yeats
- A Memory Of Youth by William Butler Yeats
- A Meditation In Time Of War by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: X. His Wildness by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: VIII. Summer And Spring by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: VII. The Friends Of His Youth by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: VI. His Memories by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: V. The Empty Cup by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: IX. The Secrets Of The Old by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: IV. The Death Of The Hare by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: III. The Mermaid by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: II. Human Dignity by William Butler Yeats
- A Man Young And Old: I. First Love by William Butler Yeats
- A Last Confession by William Butler Yeats
- A Friend’s Illness by William Butler Yeats
- A First Confession by William Butler Yeats
- A Faery Song by William Butler Yeats
- A Drunken Man’s Praise Of Sobriety by William Butler Yeats
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
