A poem by Alexander Block – Alexandre Block – Alexandr Blok – Александр Блок
(1880-1921)
Those born in obscure times
Do not remember their way.
We, children of Russia’s frightful years
Cannot forget a thing.
Incinerating years!, do you bring tidings
of madness or of hope?
The days of war, the days of freedom
Have left a bloody sheen on our faces.
There is a muteness – the tocsin bell
Has made us close our lips.
In our hearts, once so ardent,
There is a fateful emptiness.
Let the croaking ravens
Take flight above our deathbed –
O Lord, O Lord, may those more worthy than us,
Behold Thy kingdom!
A few random poems:
- Олег Григорьев – Вечером девочка Мила
- Adam: A Sacred Drama. Act 5. by William Cowper
- Аля Кудряшева – Невозможно держать в памяти все человечество
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Запретный плод
- The Prisoners Of The Little Box by Vasko Popa
- Юлия Друнина – Два вечера
- Clever Stalk by Richard Schiffman
- Epitaph by Sir Walter Raleigh
- He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead by William Butler Yeats
- Song—Sweet Afton by Robert Burns
- On A Thief (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- But I Was Looking At The Permanent Stars by Wilfred Owen
- Ballade of Dead Actors by William Ernest Henley
- Gone
- The Gardener LXIX: I Hunt for the Golden Stag by Rabindranath Tagore
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
- To A Little Girl That Has Told A Lie
- Guillaume de Lorris Belated: A Vision of Italy by Ezra Pound
- An Ode to the Democratic Rat
- Sonnet, an encyclopedic definition
- To A Feminist
- 对于女权主义者
- To the Rat’s Pencil
- 致老鼠的铅笔
- Toward Salvation
- My rat
- I Love My Rat
- 我爱我的老鼠
- Афанасий Фет – Сад весь в цвету
- Impostor’s Coronation
- Monster’s Cave
- 白色四月
- White April
- 我被包围了
- Surrounded
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

Alexander Blok (1880-1921), also Block, was a Russian poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. A classic of Russian literature.