I get home tonight to find an interesting email. I don’t get them much these days.

There’s a poem on my “about” page. If you have any interest in me or this website, then you’ve seen it. If not, I suggest you question yourself and your psuedo-support of my life.

Underneath the poem I politely beg for anyone’s help in finding the author of this poem. It’s been there since day 1.

No one’s ever commented on it, really. Not until tonight.

This email I got was from someone named Jessica. I don’t yet know who she is or how she came about this site but she sent me the following information she’s found on the poem. I am speechless at the information she was able to find and the gratitude she expressed by sending it to me.

Here it is (it is long):

I’ve found quite a variety of information about it, much of it conflicting.

The title of the poem:

� “May Your Sky Always Be Yellow”

� “ABOUT SCHOOL”

� “He Always…”

� “Yellow”

� “He Drew”

� “A POEM ABOUT NON-ACCEPTANCE”

� untitled

Who wrote it and what happened after:

� “This was written by a high school senior two weeks before he committed suicide.”

� “written by Richard Karl Roberts, 2 weeks before he committed suicide.”

� “This was written by a high school senior in Alton, Illinois, two weeks before he committed suicide.”

� “This poem was handed to a grade 12 English teacher in Regina, Saskatchewan. It is not known if the student actually wrote it himself, it is known that he committed suicide two weeks later.”

� “It has not been possible to trace the author of this poem, but it is known that he committed suicide when he was 16 years old.”

� “the Kohler Co. is doing its centennial movie on this.”

� One web page seems to claim it as the page writer’s own; it’s signed: “Mystif/Neandra 1984.” I’ve emailed that person and will report back on that lead. The version on that page is missing the extra lines at the beginning, so I suspect it’s not the original, but I could be wrong.

� One might be getting closer to the point with this prefaced description: “Authored by an adolescent male who had expressed discomfort that public school education prods its students on a one-way cattle drive.” It gives the source as “Silverstone, 1997, p. 109-110″ and the footnote reads, “Silverstone, L. Art Therapy The Person-Centered Way. (1997). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd.” If someone has access to this book it’d be nice to know what’s on page 109-110, but I’ll bet it says it’s anonymous and from Saskatchewan or Illinois.

. Two websites both credit “R. Nukerji”…there is no other info on them

� One credits it “by Dr. Helen Goodell” who apparently has something to do with education at Lock Haven University in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, since they have a scholarship named after her.

Time it was written:

� One page dates it as having been written in 1972.

� A correspondent says he heard it from a counselor in Buffalo, NY, in 1973, only without the embellishments.

� Another correspondent got it 10-12 years ago (as of 2001) translated into Danish and passed off as a poem written by a Danish boy two weeks before he killed himself.

Path of the poem as passed along:

� “This story was included as part of a workshop presented by Joan Franklin Smutny, Dirtector, The Center for the Gifted at National-Louis University.”

� Quoted by John Taylor Gatto in “Underground History of American Education.”

� Passed along by Kelleen Griffin, Columbia MBA ’99, given to her over 15 years ago, when she was in high school.

� “This poem was found in the New Environment Bulletin, the organ of the New Environment Association, 270 Fenway Drive, Syracuse, N.Y. 13224. U.S.A. I am grateful to its editor, Harry Schwarzlander, for informing me upon request that he had reprinted the poem from an “unidentified overseas source.”

Format and wording of the poem:

� One version puts “He always wanted to say things. But no one understood.” at the beginning.

� One version has the extra first line(s) as “He always wanted to say things — But none understood.”

� It’s written as prose sometimes, poetry with varying line lengths most of the time.

� One web page says, “There was also a picture, which I will try to scan in some day and post it here as well.”

I suspect from the first line(s) being missing on many versions that those first lines could have been printed in a different type face or on a different page in some early version.

The boy handed this poem to his English teacher. Two weeks later he took his

own life.

Thank you Jessica. I am in your debt.

I can only hope we one day are able to find the true author (if he/she is alive) and shake their hand for the most depressing and beautiful thing I’ve ever read.

Good day, all.