Invested with Significance

The wind blows. What does this portend?
The wind tends to blow. It does not
Intend. There’s prediction, and then

There’s something else, significance.
When you find paintings in a cave,
As a human it means something

To you, but to other humans
It means and will have meant other
Unrelated, opposite things.

Someone invested great effort
To get into that cave and paint.
That’s a logical inference.

And you may get information,
Possibly a great deal of it,
Extracted out of that painting—

The age of the painting, the cave,
The ways that the cave painters lived,
Extinct animals they hunted

Among the species that still live.
But while that information adds
To the significance, it is

Not, itself, the significance,
Not for the painters of the cave,
Not for later locals living

With it, and not even for you,
Interpreting it while the wind
Gusts past the entrance to the cave.