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Classic poem of the day

All night long the darling daughter squirms
Wild where the Toddle and the Shimmy vie
In making passion virtuous and correct,
That nature may be told just one more lie.

Her mother is a lorgnette scanning all
The eligible men upon the floor:
She thinks of what their great-grand fathers did,
Eschewing her darling might become their whore.

A spade is not a spade, and it is just
That any tremulous twisting of her lips
Should be......

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Member poem of the day

These are modern English translations of Urdu poems by Mirza Ghalib. 

Near Sainthood
by Mirza Ghalib
translation by Kanu V. Prajapati and Michael R. Burch

On the subject of mystic philosophy, Ghalib,
your words might have struck us as deeply profound ...
Hell, we might have pronounced you a saint,
if only we hadn't found
you drunk
as a skunk!

***

Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. ...

...

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