If I Were a Poet

I don’t understand what you do.
I’m sure it’s one of those things
that the world really needs—
like honeybees making honey
or old Polish women making pierogies.

And you of course don’t understand what I do.
So it probably would not help for me to plead my case
for the necessity of beauty,
to tell you about how poets dig in the earth with bare hands
looking for something, anything, that can be redeemed,
or about how when I was young,
I had a million things to say,
and I thought the whole world was listening.