Fresh Note to Old Fred

This can be right—Poetry

Doesn’t matter in the least—

And this be wrong—Poetry

Is meaningless. It’s habit

To assume meaningfulness

And mattering are tightly

Linked, if not synonymous.

What’s meaningful matters, and

What matters is meaningful,

But that’s not always the case,

At least when mattering means,

As it seems to in your poem,

Something akin to import,

Impact, being the cause of

Real, material effects.

Poetry doesn’t stop war

(You name-checked the nightmare feast

Of Putin as example,

Which I first read as Pushkin),

Doesn’t prevent invention,

Doesn’t pass legislation,

Is at most inspiration

For such actions, even if

You believe in causation.

But meaningless? Anything

Can be gifted with meaning

In the orbit of humans,

And language is expected

To have meaning anyway,

And poetry is language

Distilled—straight up or cocktails—

So it’s especially prone

To collecting meaning clouds,

But even if weren’t so,

The potential would be there.

Look at what just happened here

To your poem, with this reader.

No, your poem doesn’t matter,

But it’s meaningful. Now what?