Is that particular poem about poetry?

It's about hermeneutics, or the interpretation of texts. Hermeneutics has its origins in the interpretation of enigmatic and poetic religious texts. Lake suggests that you don't need a sophisticated theory to interpret an utterance like "the lions are coming" in monkey language. What's the point? We all know this. We do in fact need a more sophisticated hermeneutics even to read a smooth and clever poem.

Satire is allowed (to answer the 2nd question) but the satirist can be skewered in turn. Lake ain't Swift. The satire is intellectually incoherent here, in my view, because it tries to say something about "hermeneutics" without any understanding of the complexities involved. Doesn't hermeneutics start with figural language? So what's the point of talking about it in a context in which figuration is not even relevant? Or am I being too literal minded?

A deconstructionist (which I am not) would say: The poem puts into play a certain deconstructive aporia between the figural and the literal. Read as a statement about human beings, it doesn't seem to have any traction, any play; it misses the point. Read as a tale about monkeys, it is simply obvious: monkeys scream and get out of the way of lions, with no need for fancy hermeneutics. So what?