Dear Friends,

The InsideOut Literary Arts Project, where I work as its Senior Writer, is looking for your help.

For the past 15 years, InsideOut has placed creative writers—poets, novelists, short story writers—into Detroit Public School classrooms as a way of getting students to actively engage in the power and pleasure of language and the imagination.

I’ve been a writer with InsideOut since its inception. It’s a part of who I am in the world. I can tell you, first-hand, that the work we do changes lives.

When a child picks up a pencil and is asked to gaze up inside it, anything—no everything—is possible.

When you write it down, I often tell them, people have no choice but to listen, to see what you see, to know what you know.

See for yourself. Check out this poem written by a 4th grader at Fitzgerald Elementary.

Let me tell you what I knew about Dion before he wrote that poem.

Dion was that quiet kid in the back of the classroom. Before he wrote that poem I can honestly say that I didn’t know who Dion was. He was just a faceless name. A nameless face. When, at the end of our session together, I collected what the students had written on this particular day, and when I found what Dion had written down, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I couldn’t put a name to its face.

So I walked back into Mr. Petis’s room, apologized for the interruption, and whispered into his teacherly ear, “Which one is Dion?” He pointed to a small, frail-looking child in the back of the room. Dion reminded me of a bird that had fallen out of its nest. I couldn’t believe that such big words could be contained by such a small body.

I don’t recall the actual assignment that triggered Dion’s poem. I know with complete certainty that I did not ask the students to write about loss, or the death of a loved one. I tend to use language as a tool to celebrate and revel rather than to grieve. There is enough grief in the worlds of these children without me forcing them to look in places where they might not want to look.

It’s possible that the assignment that day was simply to write about something happened back when you were little. Maybe I had asked them to write about a “first” in their life: the first time they rode a bike, or flew a kite, or went fishing. You get the picture. I didn’t expect to find a poem about a young boy losing his mother to a drunk driver.

I was torn up and blown away by what I found and so I pulled Dion out of the classroom and we sat down in the hallway and we spoke about what he’d just a few minutes ago written. I remember telling Dion that the poem he just wrote was really powerful and beautiful and sad and I remember also asking him if what he’d written down was true. Why I asked this I don’t know the reason why. Maybe I was hoping he’d made it up so that I wouldn’t have to imagine his grief.

But he nodded yes, mostly with his eyes, and said that it was and from here he went on to re-tell me some of the details of what had happened. It was a crushing half hour that we spent together out in the quiet hum of his massive inner city elementary school with close to two-thousand other Dions sitting in classrooms just like his.

I know I’ll never forget it. I hope that Dion remembers it still. I like to believe that moments like these don’t simply disappear. For me the moment is forever fixed in time because of the poem which, whenever I return to it, I am transported back to that day when this little bird of a boy whose life and name I hardly knew changed my own life forever.

Dion went on, later in the year, to read this poem in front of hundreds of people at our year-end InsideOut gala celebration. Here again Dion’s works left their mark on all those who were there to hear it.

That’s just one story behind just one of the many poems written each year in an InsideOut classroom. Now that I’ve been taken back, through time and space, by Dion’s poem, I remember now that this was a poem written in the year immediately after the events of 9/11.

That same year a 5th grader at the same school wrote this short poem:

The world, though, thank goodness, is not always so dark. I’d say most of the poems written by these young poets sing and celebrate what to them is beautiful and loved in their lives. I could bombard you with a whole slew of poems here, but instead I’ll hit you with just this one, a poem from a 3rd grader called “A Love That is Bigger Than Me.”

Tags: insideout, Peter Markus