Les Murray: "The Meaning of Existence"

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe. 

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

"The Meaning of Existence" by Les Murray. Text as published in Poems the Size of Photographs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

Art credit: "Lemur (Zen)," photograph taken on October 12, 2008, by Sebastien Degardin.