About Alan Reynolds

Poet born and raised in North Carolina and now after a sojourn in England a long-time resident of the Netherlands. More than 4,000 poems, many published in US and UK literary magazines and on CD and in books.

Making a Shuffle of Rare Bits

Posted on 22 Sep 2025 by Alan Reynolds

When I welsh on my rabbit he goes spare
attacks my ginger beer and ginger hair
with any simple tool that comes to hand.
There are so many. One that he finds grand,
the celt, a common prehistoric tool
I had to throw away before the fool,
flat hat on backwards, hatter shades or worse,
had used the celt to chisel me, the hearse
drawn up and weighing on his mortal soul
and wanting mine and perhaps the whole
of what I want continued for a bit.
There’s something else my rabbit likes: a brit,
the young of herring and related fish
from the Welsh word ‘brithyll’ and a tasty dish
for Anglophobes and Anglophiles and Phil,
my rabbit’s name. Sometimes I call him Bill
but that’s Dutch courage. When Phil drinks he’ll bore
the heart out of a haggis with his store
of hoppy tales; the one of the Scotch egg
is crumby, and his rare bit re the leg
of the dog that bit him is one I can’t watch
and he has others I attempt to scotch.
A hare is what is wanted here I know
now Phil’s rabbiting about his new Dutch hoe.
I’ll get my Irish up or else he’ll bring
in, ecumenically, the Rabbi Ting.

An Almost Crusader

Posted on 7 Sep 2025 by Alan Reynolds

He’s the last one I wanted to find, that Savonarola,
even now, when my life’s blandness draws first blood
like the smooth sharp stones that scrape the soles of waders.
It is Savonarola. He finds me. We stand in mud
and look past each other at the surf
out near the curved horizon. Neither speaks
but we both know that the first who does will lose.
He wants the soul I claim I do not have,
materialism being my chosen poison.
I want a cause, not his, but one as fiery
and consuming as the flames that took his life
in Florence, when Rodrigo Borgia won.

‘How was it then?’ I ask, gasp when he bares
unfleshed teeth. He says, ‘It hurt. I won.’
He wades waist deep. I follow. Shore birds wheel
above our tracks that the flooding tide erases.
‘You may ask me where we are going,’ he appends
to his first speech. We walk further. It’s less cold
but clammier than I’d thought from books it’d be,
this seaweed-troubled water. He starts to swim
while I who have forgotten, try to float
past a giant jellyfish with tentacles that reach
between us and beyond but do not sting.
It looks like a pope we both once vaguely knew.

‘That’s my mirror fish, my fluid crystal ball,’
he says. I know to answer but have lost
my volition. I dumbly bob and roll
in the current as he leads me on and dives.
We plunge through roiled green water into mud
and through that too, through rock that melts to magma.
Less hot. Less cold. Less everything. Less life.
Savonarola stops, says, ‘Welcome to my world’
and disintegrates. I am totally alone
with the thought that I wish I had followed once in life
a cause with meaning, known a crusade’s glow.
Even Earth’s iron core cannot inflame me.

Lessons from the Leopard

Posted on 2 Sep 2025 by Alan Reynolds

The welcome wagon shields us from the weather.
With four-wheel drive and food-chained every tyre,
we roll like lords across the lochs and heather
and (‘Pull!’) down birds of clay and those with feather,
their throats a song, their eyes on something higher.
We throw the clay away and cook as fryer
the latter bird. This makes us feel we’re free
of both, and by extension have to be
the kings of all we see from oil-slicked sea
to town and back, and all that lies between.

Our hubris is amusing to the leopard
who licks his chops while we crouch down to clean
our prey and pray the cat’s grin does not mean
what we are sure it does: our history’s peppered
with tales of cats less fond of sheep than shepherd.
We, sport killers, easily equate
with the urges of this feline and his mate
who’ve always killed more monkeys than they ate.
Monkey’s minor when a leopard feasts.
A proper meal, and sport, requires an ape.

Baboons will do. Chimpanzees, arrivistes,
make curious cuts—but on the geests
and other meadows we and leopards share
we are their favourites: slow and thin of hair.
Each day, somewhere, some leopard will explain
to one of us, alert through fright and pain,
our place in nature’s predatory chain.
Those of us the leopard’s personally taught
are oft consumed with interest in the topic
which means the leopard’s lessons come to naught.

Big-head chimpanzees claim the leopard’s tropic
and put on airs and clothes. Should they be caught
and eaten, their survivors say they ought
to have stayed inside the car, or heeded horoscopic
intelligence, or been ornithoscopic
enough to know the leopard’s not unkind
but (he’s our cousin) similarly inclined
to follow courses we’ve ourselves outlined:
killing what we can in every weather
as if the food chain cannot ever tire.