What words do to me every week?

Last night while discussing a poem by Aryanil Mukherjee, there came up a question that I have conveniently avoided all these while, 'What does this poem mean?', by insisting that poetry is personal. Sometimes I am content by watching how the poem makes me feel without actually understanding the poem, to feel the flow of ideas, images, to react in a very personal way to choice of words, their juxtapositions, and to weigh for myself if the whole experience made me feel good. I am not saying that my way of enjoying poems really is the only way of enjoying poems. I think of myself as a consumer of poetry, and not an authority on it. When I tell people, I enjoy reading poems, they seem to ask me to explain the "inner meanings" of the poems, and the truth is I am afraid I haven't understood it myself. But of course, I would love to talk about it.

From last nights discussion I learned that the poem, I was so fond of, I had colored it with all sorts of personal interpretations (and may be which is why the poem was special and memorable to me), but I had also overlooked a lot in it and that I hadn't read it enough. And that exposition sort of left me feeling vulnerable and embarrassed. I felt like wanting to defend against the allegations of being fake or superficial. I haven't got a resolution about it yet and I am going to let the unease prick me awhile.

Here is a poem that I recently read and liked:

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon
the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:
everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation
upon the giant tortoises
withering finally on a remote island.

I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can't quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there;
already the event
like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize
plodding past me in a straggling line
awkward without water

their small heads pondering
from side to side, their useless armour
sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed
lumbering up the steps, under the archways
toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,
the relics of what we have destroyed,
our holy and obsolete symbols.

 -Elegy for the Giant Tortoises, Margaret Atwood