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:
- Heart of God by Vachel Lindsay
- Water by Robert Lowell
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Комета
- The Blessed by William Butler Yeats
- angel_of_better_days_to_come.html
- Convalescence poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- O Living Always—Always Dying. by Walt Whitman
- Robert Burns: On Commissary Goldie’s Brains:
- Анатолий Жигулин – Лесные дороги
- Ode To Sleep by Thomas Warton
- On Wenlock Edge The Wood’s In Trouble poem – A. E. Housman
- This Month The Almonds Bloom At Kandahar
- STEPPING OUT by Satish Verma
- Олег Бундур – Клубника созрела
- How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza by Vachel Lindsay
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
- Nutting by William Wordsworth
- Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room by William Wordsworth
- November 1813 by William Wordsworth
- November, 1806 by William Wordsworth
- My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth
- Mutability by William Wordsworth
- Most Sweet it is by William Wordsworth
- Minstrels by William Wordsworth
- Michael Angelo In Reply To The Passage Upon His Staute Of Sleeping Night by William Wordsworth
- Michael: A Pastoral Poem by William Wordsworth
- Methought I Saw The Footsteps Of A Throne by William Wordsworth
- Memory by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour Of Scotland, 1803 VI. Glen-Almain, Or, The Narrow Glen by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland 1814 I. Suggested By A Beautiful Ruin Upon One Of The Islands Of Lo by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XIV. Fly, Some Kind Haringer, To Grasmere-Dale by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XII. Yarrow Unvisited by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XII. Sonnet Composed At —- Castle by William Wordsworth
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 X. Rob Roy’s Grave by William Wordsworth
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
