Image: Alexander Pavlov/Shutterstock.com

I posted a poem on Facebook the other day, and got hate mail.

This was a surprise, to be honest. It was just a wee poem, well a three-minute read, estimated a website through which I created it on before sending.

I’m not sure if that estimation is a good or bad thing. Three minutes? But it was enough time for Facebook strangers, certainly not friends, to say, in one case, to basically take your Bible and f–k off. This was discombobulating.

The poem is called God’s Memory, and is prefaced with a quote from Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who was born a couple of decades after Christ returned to his father. The quote was: “The robber of your free will does not exist”.

Epictetus was known as a Stoic, which transcended to how I felt on getting the mail.

I reminded myself of the lines from WH Auden in his poem on the death of WB Yeats: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives/A way of happening, a mouth.”

The poem was, I thought, just a dipping of hands into the waters of life, death, what is within our reach and what is not.

In the end, it’s only my words, my thoughts. Nothing happens? Well, this did. Funny it should draw such a response so far removed from its intention or meaning, I thought for it didn’t cause a city to go into lockdown, no one was hurt in its making or distribution. It was just a wee poem, and yet it was both misinterpreted and the trigger for short diatribes.

At least I can take heart that it was being read. Of all the forms of writing, a poem is the most fragile. You toss it onto the breeze and it’s either carried along or falls to ground, unnoticed, unloved.

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This is not a snowflake moment (and I’ve been called that over past columns on matters political), or a woe is me, my soul is crushed. There are so many more people who are bombarded with strains of virulent verbiage compared to myself.

If nothing else, the reaction to God’s Memory is but a minute example of the new world order where holding onto your voice when the air is shot with cacophonous rage can be a battle.

Governments, including Scott Morrison’s, are moving to swat the trolls by laying the accountability for defamatory remarks onto the site where they have landed (who declare they are not publishers, but merely facilitators). People can go through the courts to seek redress, and a kind of justice, but it is costly and beyond the means of most.

The federal eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was reported in The Age this week that she told a Senate hearing last month that Australians made 23,500 reports of illegal and harmful content last year on social media.

Online abuse can be insidious, cruel and soul destroying and life-threatening. Online bullying can lead to the victim killing themselves. What pieces of work are some people, knowing, and they must, that when they press send, they press suffering, too?

The federal government is releasing a draft law this week to courts the power to order social media companies to strip the anonymity away behind trolls’ accounts.

My receiving of abuse seems small fry in comparison. I can laugh it off, as I did when the f–k off message piped onto my phone this morning as I was walking the dog.

I realise not everyone has the same level of critical nonchalance as I do. It’s certainly not arrogance, but that given everyone has an opinion, it follows that only those you respect will actually touch your skin and heart.

And that’s the thing with poetry. Everyone brings to a poem their own life. If you’re lucky as the creator, it will resonate with someone, like a bell chiming, through the fractured air.