Poems Don't Have Other Readers Poem by Dennis Ryan

Sunday morning, February 10,2019 at 11: 10 a.m.; Wednesday morning, May 20,2020

'He does not know what he has to say until he has said it, and in the effort to say it he is not concerned with making other people understand anything.'
- T.S. Eliot, 'The Three Voices of Poetry'

Poems don't have other readers,
no, not at first, if ever. They may
perhaps, later on, if, by chance,
a reader chooses a poem, and wonders
how it was composed, what moved
the poet to write such lines.
Perhaps then, and only then
poems, the poem has a reader.