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