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:
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Что шумишь
- Funny Networking Poem and Do’s and Don’ts
- The Boy by Marilyn Hacker
- God Of Roads by Yvor Winters
- Gamajun, the Prophetic Bird poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Николай Гумилев – Капитаны
- Yasin Khan
- A Prayer poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- The useless counsellor by Ross D Tyler
- The Heritage by Siegfried Sassoon
- SOMALIA CALLING by Satish Verma
- Botanically by Satish Verma
- Lucky by Thomas Lux
- Федор Сологуб – Когда я в бурном море плавал
- Slow To Come, Quick Agone by William Barnes
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
- Calais, August 1802 by William Wordsworth
- Calais, August 15, 1802 by William Wordsworth
- By The Side Of The Grave Some Years After by William Wordsworth
- By The Seaside by William Wordsworth
- “By Moscow Self-Devoted To A Blaze” by William Wordsworth
- “Brook! Whose Society The Poet Seeks” by William Wordsworth
- British Freedom by William Wordsworth
- “Brave Schill! By Death Delivered” by William Wordsworth
- Bothwell Castle by William Wordsworth
- Book Twelfth [Imagination And Taste, How Impaired And Restored ] by William Wordsworth
- Book Thirteenth [Imagination And Taste, How Impaired And Restored Concluded] by William Wordsworth
- Book Third [Residence at Cambridge] by William Wordsworth
- Book Tenth {Residence in France continued] by William Wordsworth
- Book Sixth [Cambridge and the Alps] by William Wordsworth
- Book Seventh [Residence in London] by William Wordsworth
- Book Second [School-Time Continued] by William Wordsworth
- Book Ninth [Residence in France] by William Wordsworth
- Book Fourth [Summer Vacation] by William Wordsworth
- Book Fourteenth [conclusion] by William Wordsworth
- Book First [Introduction-Childhood and School Time] 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
