Nature plays games with itself whether we watch it or not.
This idea hit me like a thunderbolt when I was a teenager, sitting in trigonometry class. Who would have thought triangles did such neat things even before there were any people around to think about them?
And immediately after came the more troubling thought: triangles are all in our heads. Trigonometry happens in our mind, not out in the real world. You can't buy triangles by the pound, or by the yard, or carry them in a box. They are not real things, they are thoughts about the relations between real things.
A poem about a flower doesn't tell you anything about flowers, just about how we think about them. And we don't think about things, we think about what we can say about things.