The Poem Is the Prayer

THREE YEARS AGO, I WROTE A story for GUIDEPOSTS about how a poem saved a forest.

I’m a professional poet. One of the best-known aspects of my work is what I call Poem Store. I set up a typewriter in a public place and write poems on request for whatever people choose to pay.

My GUIDEPOSTS STORY, published in April 2016, was about an unlikely friendship with one of my Poem Store customers, a timber company executive named Neal Ewald. I’m a passionate environmentalist. Neal’s company, Green Diamond Resource Company, planned to log a pristine tract of old-growth redwood trees near the northern California town where I lived.

At the time we met, I had no idea who Neal was. All I knew was that