Appreciating Readers

Appreciating Readers

Thank You ! Mary Bagwell, for writing that you enjoy my poems and urging me to keep writing them. I'm sorry, but you don't join a long list of my admirers, in fact, that list is so short it embarrasses me. Those, who write verse for pleasure, surround themselves in obscurity.

Too often someone like me, a farmer by occupation and a civic/municipal activist by choice, doesn't dabble in mental agility preoccupations, such as, poetry. Although my ancestral countryman, Robert Burns, referred to himself as the Plowman's Bard and, when he wasn't chasing women, he was farming while oft in his head he was composing verse.

Retired now many years, it wasn't until my wife, Connie, bought me an iPad a few years ago, so I could distribute my poems and essays electronically, that I felt comfortable writing daily. I am not educated in poetry and, I'm sure many of those who are, look down on my attempts as immature and frivolous.

I receive Poetry magazine monthly and read it cover to cover religiously. Reading newly written poems in Poetry magazine really puts me in my place. To me, today's poems are mostly unreadable and certainly not understandable by enlarge. Try as I may, modern poetry is not very reader friendly, so if you're out of the circle of the learned, you're like a fish out of water.

I've resolved myself to write for myself, post my efforts and, if anyone likes to read them also, I am flattered. Thank You again, Mary. Sadly, age will become my final arbiter, the true determiner of the time constraint lashed to all of our feet. But now, with my writing out in cyberspace, words in verse may last for an eternity, never to disappear, but to reappear upon someone's whim to connect with a deceased ancestor. If they're
determined to be readable or not isn't my decision to make, it's the reader who makes that ultimate choice.

Ronald C. Downie