Dave Bonta's poem runs to only eight lines, and its speaker never says he saw the king. He went to the well "to see / the king touch people / for the king's evil," and then the poem turns away from the king toward the people waiting and the weather around them. That turn is the poem's main move.
A little context helps. "The king's evil" was an old name for scrofula, a disease that swells the glands of the neck, which monarchs were once believed to cure by touch. The speaker sets out, then, to witness a display of royal power, a public miracle. What he reports is "the poor people" who "stand / all morning in the rain." There are no hands, no healing, no crown. The ceremony shrinks to its least glamorous part, the waiting.
The tenses help. "I went" is past, a single trip, but "stand" is present, so the scene slides out of one anecdote into something that seems to be always happening. Poor people standing in the rain begins to look less like one morning than a permanent condition. The phrase "king's evil" also becomes uneasy. Grammatically it names the illness the king cures, but heard fresh, with "evil" alone at the end of line three, it could also suggest an evil that belongs to the king. The poem never says so, which is part of its power, but the ambiguity is there for a reader to hear.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, and its short lines read plainly, almost like a ballad or folktale opening. "I went to the well to see" is the sort of line a storyteller might begin with. The well is an ordinary, everyday place, not a palace or cathedral, and that makes the royal visit feel faintly out of place. The punctuation is sparse. There is one comma, after "rain," and one full stop at the very end. The second sentence therefore runs on, and its last part is an absolute phrase: "the wind in the corn / changing all remembrance / into country." The grammar makes two things happen at once. The people stand, and the wind works on them and on everything else.
The line breaks add to the effect. "Changing all remembrance" stops before "into country," so the reader hangs on "remembrance" for a moment before it is converted into land. That word carries two senses, memory and commemoration, the official kind of remembering done through ceremonies and records. The wind, with its sweeping "all," undoes that. The poem suggests that the formal memory of a royal ritual doesn't last. What remains is closer to folk memory, rustling and unofficial, shaped by weather and soil.
The sound patterns support this. "Went," "well," and "wind" share a soft w, so the wind seems to be present before it is named. The hard k of "king," "king's," "corn," and "country" ties the monarch to the field by sound, and the last word seems to absorb the first. "Touch" and "country" also echo each other's vowel, as if the one act the king was meant to perform dissolves into the landscape at the end. "Country" itself stays open. It could mean countryside, rural life, or the nation, and the poem doesn't choose.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In under fifty words it takes on power, belief, poverty, and memory without lecturing about any of them. It neither mocks the ritual nor honors it. It withholds both the king and the cure, and leaves the rain, the corn, and the patient crowd. By doing so it implies that history told from the throne gets quietly rewritten by the people who wait and by the land they stand on.