Write a little. Write a lot.
Avoid words like ‘Hottentot’
Look up meanings. Drift down streams
of leftist leanings, rightist dreams.
Closure is often oversold.
Right It
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Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds
Requiem for Long-ago Acquaintance
The wind resembles cymbals made of cheese,
its music mute, or, if heard, absurd.
Perhaps it’s simply gone, but if so where?
Can absence ipso facto describe wind?
And you, where are you? People say you’ve died.
Where were you all those years they say you lived?
Perhaps we each were cymbals stored apart,
our music moot as that of those of cheese.
Faith is Grand
‘Ask,’ she says. ‘Demand is sweeter than fulfillment.’
The sun, there have been clouds, stays disappeared.
We believe in its existence; faith is grand
and this time sensible, a trust not weakened
by being based on thought. I take her hand.
Falls
The poems that I learned as a child
– I’ve forgotten the words –
let rhythms glide by where I stand
on a rock in the creek.
I gaze at the banks where I saw
the black moccasin smile.
That was so long ago. Now I look
way upstream to the falls
remembering Grandfather laughing
while helping me climb
through cool spray and shadow to sun.
Where had we been going?
Guest of Honour
He’s the only stranger here among his family.
He is strangely silent all the time he talks.
The mirrored walls reflect his animation
and he sees that, though he swears he’s sitting still
as the rubber flowers on the hotel’s tables.
A wall of sound wafts by him but he fails
to capture joy or meaning from remarks
of kindness addressed to him. Disappearing
into his cell phone’s menu like it matters
he swipes and taps and wishes he could cry
at reflections from its screen of an old man
so lonely he updates his own Sent Mail.
A Goddess Awakens
The sun shown in the heavens.
The moon shined boats at sea.
The slow glow maiden Amalot
Two-Handle slept till three
then Everywhere condensed into
the point she knew as Here
and the Wisdom-Tooth man Getafix
pulled her a pint of beer.
Their breakfast was a fleet of trout
she flummoxed with a net
and flipped on shore then in a pan
while Wisdom-Tooth Man set
a table where mad hatters served
as party favours for
the guests he said were coming soon.
She watched amazed he’d pour
a Stetson full of beer into
tall schooners meant for port.
He told her it was what he’d seen
the Windsors do at court.
This mollified the maiden and
the idea made her smile
as she cut him into chunks she chucked
to her pet crocodile.
Not Much Speak Of
Two languages, two accents, neither mine.
I can do them both, not adequately but so
you’d recognize their traces in my whine
and bark and stops for glottal. Travels sow
the seeds for weedy puns and frontiers grow
so porous that they’re more honoured in the breach
than in the competence I nearly reach.
Occasioning confusion, stares and glee,
I am grateful that despite my slanted speech
the natives here, and there, are kind to me.
Glimpse of Emotion
I dreamed I was on a mountain,
not the top but a south-side cove
where a deer had grazed till a bear walked through
and disappeared in haze.
I wake in a land that is totally flat
out to the horizon’s curve.
The seagulls scream and the jackdaws speak
and the willows grow new limbs.
There are no snakes here, nor a need for screens.
It is civilised it seems.
The bear I dreamed of has grown up
and long ago it died.
Earth Tourist 