Youth always wonders whether life contains meaning
Old age sought the answers for a lifetime and came up empty
Usually, we poets are regarded as beneficent tribal elders
Swift to impart the accumulated wisdom of human experience
Poised to dip querulous quills in the ink of intrigue
Ordered to explain man’s eternal fascination with enigma
The reality is that we poets are just as clueless as the rest
The world looks to us for answers and we have only questions
Eternally, we strive to explore the nature of mystery
Defining aspects of the human condition as best we can
More often than not, we only manage to discover new mysteries
Yearning for closure even as we’re opening Pandora’s box
A plethora of puzzles pours forth with no solutions in sight
Control eludes us and all we’re left with is the eternal quest
Ridiculous, isn’t it, that we poets should aspire to achieve control
Over hidden depths of meaning we could never hope to understand
Still, with all our bumbling and fumbling, we sometimes succeed
There are new planets teeming in every pensive poet’s inkwell
It’s a manifestly mystical task, this great profession of poetry –
Creating worlds within worlds wherever we wield our wonderful words
