"Soft Answers."
The seed that met water spoke a little name.
Great sunflowers were lording the air that day.
This was before Jesus, before Rome.
That other air was readying our hundreds of years
to say things that rain has beat down on over broken stones
and heaped behind us in many slag lands.
Quiet in the earth, a drop of water came.
And the little seed spoke.
Sequoia is my name.
I think about writing and I try to justify my coming so far
on an occasion like this.
I think about some people would say, well,
the writing is written.
Why don't people just read it?
Well, one justification-- or not read it.
One justification is to come level somehow and witness
about this process.
And I have a feeling, as a writer, that a poem now
is anything that begins and has some kind of promise
in it and then a payoff.
And I think about saying this with "Soft Answers" poem,
simply because it just says something,
then it has a parenthesis and a closure.
I don't want to make any claims for this poem.
Far from it.
Sometimes I think there's too much of a gimmick.
Just withhold information and then say at the end Sequoia.
Well, that's just an idea.
Still, in a more subtle way and better ways,
maybe that's what form does.
I don't know.