May Your Sky Always Be Yellow

This has been passed along to me in email after a discussion about art teachers who oppress their students. It's all over the web, and it's gone around on a couple of newsgroups. 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"
• "On Education"
• 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.
• 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.
• From a kind internet correspondent, she writes on November 17, 2007: "I received a copy of this poem in 1978 from my English teacher. She had received it on the first day of her university education course work many years earlier."

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."

Anyway, here it is (glurge alert):

MAY YOUR SKY ALWAYS BE YELLOW

He always wanted to explain things
But noone cared
So he drew
Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything
He wanted to carve it in stone
Or write it in the sky
He would lie out on the grass
And look up at the sky
And it would be only the sky and him that needed saying
And it was after that
He drew the picture
It was a beautiful picture
He kept it under his pillow
And would let no one see it
And he would look at it every night
And think about it
And when it was dark
And his eyes were closed
He could still see it
And it was all of him
And he loved it
When he started school he brought it with him
Not to show anyone but just to have it with him
Like a friend
It was funny about school
He sat in a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks
And he thought it should be red
And his room was a square brown room
Like all the other rooms
And it was tight and close
And stiff
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk
With his arms stiff and his feet flat on the floor
Stiff
With the teacher watching
And watching
The teacher came and smiled at him
She told him to wear a tie
Like all the other boys
He said he didn't like them
And she said it didn't matter
After that they drew
And he drew all yellow
And it was the way he felt about morning
And it was beautiful
The teacher came and smiled at him
"What's this?" she said
"Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing?"
"Isn't that beautiful?"
After that his mother bought him a tie
And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships
Like everyone else
And he threw the old picture away
And when he lay out alone and looked out at the sky
It was big and blue and all of everything
 But he wasn't anymore
He was square inside and brown
And his hands were stiff
And he was like everyone else
And the things inside him that needed saying
Didn't need it anymore
It had stopped pushing
It was crushed
Stiff
Like everything else.

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