An Open Letter to Readers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Dear Readers,

No poem today as I live alone, am feeling very tired, and need to get on with some housework. However, still trying to keep one step ahead of tomorrow here... by writing a poem for New Year's Day; it is taking shape already, and I intend to finish it in time to publish on January 1st.

Writing poetry this year has been tough, given the effects of Covid-19 worldwide. More than one reader has complained that my poems "lack imagination, not least for being less concerned with poetry as an art form than with social commentary." and I have to concede that they may well have a point. However, with people losing hope and struggling to rise above that as well as the coronavirus itself, I have concentrated, for the most part, in trying to inject significant positive thinking into my poems. As I do so, it helps me, and I can only hope it helps some of you as well.

To be honest, I doubted whether I had another poem in me, having written nearly a thousand for this blog alone.  If some poems appear to lack imagination, I can only say that I have had to summon no small degree of that for every poem I have written during the pandemic; sifting through the tumult of my own emotions - from a growing sense of fear and despair to those old standbys love and hope - in I try reach out to readers in such a way that they can feel my reaching out to them, especially those who are feeling isolated and/ or lonely.

I cannot expect every reader to like every poem, and I often have second thoughts about a poem myself; as you may have noticed, I will significantly revise a poem and even replace titles from time to time. On the whole, though, I take your staying with me and the blog as an appreciation of my efforts for which I feel  both grateful and inspired. 

In the sense that I am, after all, just an ordinary Joe, trying to make the most of retirement in spite of various health issues, you, my readers, play as important a part in my well-being as the poems I write for the you-me-us that is the common multicultural and multinational humanity on which the world turns. For all its faults and flaws (and ours) it is a good world that, one way or another, will get the better of those criminal and bigoted elements that try to turn it (and us) upside down and inside out., not least by our joining forces against them whenever and wherever we can. 

Okay, no one is perfect, least of all yours truly, but personalities do clash, misunderstandings do occur and  neither bode well with regard to mending bridges. Perhaps if we talked to each other more instead of rushing to judgement and/ or being so cocksure that we are right and the other person is wrong...?

Communication  is a common theme in my poems. Too many of us don't talk to each other enough; talk, that is, to hear, to listen, and be prepared to see the other person's point of view. I write from personal experience; apart from my mother, few among my immediate or extended family were ever prepared to engage in a conversation which might not go completely in their favour, so now we are estranged, for which I'm sorry and not sorry; sorry because family should mean more than it has ever meant to me and not sorry because living without being able to engage in mutual communication as opposed to mere conversation is just too stressful. 

If I had been able to discuss my being gay with my family instead of their asking me and coming to their own stereotypical conclusions amongst themselves, I might well have made less of a mess of my younger years, and fewer mistakes. It was much the same with my deafness, at home and at work; both were a nightmare at times, not least because few people understand perceptive deafness; how much  a person hears depends not only on the pitch of another person's voice, but on local acoustics as well. As I did not see a specialist until I was twenty-one and had left home, my schooldays were a nightmare. I could not understand why I could hear a teacher in one classroom, but not in another, so would often sit at the back and hear/ learn very little. 

Even in later years, explanations would often be seen as excuses of which relatively few people took any notice, so my quality of life continued in much the same vein.

At 75, I can honestly say that, on balance, there have been more good times than bad in my life. Time . Time and again ,a flagging faith in myself and human nature generally has been restored by engaging with those such wonderful people as are not only willing to help and/or advise others, but listen to them as well; more often then not, the latter it is the best form of help one person can give another. 

Who knows? Maybe this year's having been so awful for so many of us, the true value of listening may yet be restored wherever, in the past, it has been woefully neglected; whenever it is taken on board and acted upon appropriately, may none of us take it for granted. 

A reader asks, only yesterday, how i can write about the human spirit when I do not subscribe to any of the world religions. As regular readers well know, I have never seen religion as having a monopoly on spirituality.  Where people take comfort and inspiration from their religion, I have every respect for that; it is with certain religious agendas that I have taken issue since childhood.

Back (with a poem) on New Year's Day, folks,

Hugs,

Roger

PS Enjoy the blog archives; see right hand side of any blog page.

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