I would like to swim in the Atlantic,
to swim with someone who understood
why my fear of drowning plays less dire
than my fear of bones, walking the ocean floor.
I would like to sync my stroke with a beloved.
I’d like to stand on deck on a boat
and jump in the sea and say, follow me,
and know you would. The sea is cold
and it’s deep, too, I’d joke,
standing at the edge of the boat’s bow.
A wind breathes across the sea,
joining gently the edges of time.
With a dog paddling behind me,
I want to crawl across the water
without thinking about a future.
I have set my eyes upon the shore
and I hold you there—steady, in focus—
but let you go when, from below,
a voice breaks to the surface.
A few random poems:
- For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
- Владимир Высоцкий – Говорят, лезу прямо под нож
- Lifetime Of Death by Steve Sant
- I love you
- Manure by Mark R Slaughter
- Metaphors Of A Magnifico by Wallace Stevens
- Acknowledgment. by Sidney Lanier
- Владимир Высоцкий – Не возьмут и невзгоды в крутой оборот…
- Гавриил Державин – На рождение царицы Гремиславы
- The Female of the Species by Rudyard Kipling
- Fear No More by William Shakespeare
- Олег Бундур – Утром
- Николай Гумилев – Она говорила
- Hobbinol; or The Rural Games by William Somervile
- Владимир Британишский – Пароход пришел
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
- La Nue
- Kyrenaikos
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- I Loved
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Fragments
- Eudaemon
- El Extraviado
- Do You Remember Once
- Coucy
- Champagne 1914 15
- Broceliande
- Bellinglise
- At The Tomb Of Napoleon
- Ariosto Orlando Furioso Canto X 91 99
- Antinous
- An Ode To Antares
- All Thats Not Love
- After An Epigram Of Clement Marot
- A Message To America
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

A. Van Jordan, born 1965 in Akron, Ohio, USA, is a contemporary American poet and the author of four important collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton,, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize.