I get home tonight to find an interesting…

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.