Dashing It All
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Author Archives: Alan Reynolds
The Stolen Republic
Wonker Noddly Imagined
Shout Out
Shout Out
Jeanne d’Arc
I went down, as I had resolved to do,
to the house where the preachers preyed.
‘You who know should help me,’
were the words I used. I said:
‘Please explain the cruelty.’
Not one stone replied.
Twenty-five years after Joan of Arc burned
Rouen’s city fathers said she shouldn’t have died.
—They apologised
—They agonised
—Their more poetic eulogised—
But still, she lay,
a little lump: unleavened clay.
She could not sue. Her suet grey
had melted clean and cleared away.
(Joan of Arc and I both occasionally visited Rouen for our work. Hers had not only obviously more impact but also, so far, more definite termination. Each time that I am in Rouen, I think of her, and of the savageries we ascribe to religion, and I sing this little song for her.)
The Morning Watch
The Wind resembles the Emptiness it fills.
I cannot tell which is which except in songs.
An earthworm ground from passing through a sparrow
becomes tibia marrow further up the food chain.
‘We have that,’ says the cat, and I say, ‘What?’
‘Tibia marrow,’ the cat answers. ‘Men have wind.’
We sit in companionable silence in the darkness.
The clouds that rain on us block out the moon.
The metallic music made in the sailboats’ rigging
as the wind whips up the harbour’s surface riles
what I’ve learned to call imagination.
‘I see a god almighty,’ says the cat.
‘On the furthest sloop,’ the cat adds. ‘Do you see it?
‘Look, there’s one more on each yardarm. Will they fight?’
‘They do not always fight,’ I whisper. We both watch
and when the cat sees I see nothing we both sigh.
The first heron of the morning glides above sedately.
In the sodden earth behind us birds hunt worms.
Best Words for Species Speeds
Wayside
‘You must believe enough to kill, or else
it’s not a faith with content you profess.’
He praised his gods and roasted flesh and bones
of passers-by the odds had sent his way.
‘Pass-over bread’ he called the grim meal ground
from pilgrims shriven, freed of soul and baked
to slake the hunger of his tribe. They lived
among us not so long ago, his tribe;
in fact, their ways instruct us still: we kill
for oil, and other reasons we invent
to justify existence, on the wayside, in our tent.
‘I differ. I refuse to live that way,’
my Esther tells me, angry-eyed in Ghent
abhorring all the gore that’s eulogised
in this cathedral’s stained glass panes. Yes, ‘stained,’
a word that’s perfect to explain the tales
these windows glorify, these escapades
of lopping limbs for Lords that favour blood
to irrigate paths to the Holy Grail.
We call them High Crusades on Holy Days
and glorify their crimes in history books. ‘That’s wrong,’
my Esther tells me fiercely, ‘we’re not like that anymore.’
We cared enough to kill still in Kuwait,
with rockets, rifles, flames: bulldozers shoved
hot sand and buried boys stashed far from home
in ditches they hand-dug to stop our tanks.
I’m sure somewhere some parson offered thanks
to Mammon—or gods with modern names
whom we invent to take our garbage out.
‘You said we should!’ My troops are sick with rage.
‘You said Hussein must fall—whatever cost,
or else, like Hitler, he would kill us all.’
‘Of course I did,’ I answer, from the wayside, in my tent.
Earth Tourist 