While searching for some information on a former student of mine, Trevor Yeats, I stumbled upon a blog called the Arts of May which featured the very poem I was looking for. A friend, Michael McAllister Lyon had posted a drawing of a young William Butler Yeats and I was struck by how similar Trevor and William looked and wanted to share it. I was not expecting to find an accolade in a random blog dated 2014. It seems Trevor’s old poem written in 1992, continues to move people across the time continuum.What a gift that was to find the reference. I’m still no closer to finding Trevor than I was before. I wish him well, wherever he is. And a big thank you to Lily S. May of Toronto, Canada for the shout-out. I’m truly humbled. I wonder if this is my Trevor? What do you think? Oh, and I got dinged for spam by FaceFook when I posted this link.
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| William Butler Yeats by John Singer Sargent, 1908. pencil, 9 x 6 in. |
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| Facebook bots marked the Trevor Yeats photo as spam! WTF? |
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| William Butler Yeats by his brother, Jack (John B. Yeats), 1900. |
- I lifted a few paragraphs from my interview. Jack’s great-grand child Trevor wrote:
THIS BODY IS TO ASK:
This body is to ask
this question of the mind:
Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?
Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?
Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?
Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?
This is the breath, to breathe this air.
—Trevor Yeats, 2nd Grade, Higham Family School, Santa Rosa
From THIS BODY IS TO ASK: Sonoma County Students and Artists in Residence Marsha Connell and Maureen Hurley (©1993)
And when Trevor read his poem, it transported us out of this world—we were all stunned into silence, it was that kind of good. When he read his poem, we completely forgot what we were doing, and it generated a lively discussion of the earth and the depletion of the ozone layer.
What's amazing is that the poem didn’t come out of a specific lesson plan; it was an offshoot of several topics we’d been discussing. Students imagined themselves as animals, the earth, the moon, space—asking the Who Am I question—delving deeper into metaphor. The week before, we’d written poems in response to Chief Seattle’s letter to the earth and Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend.
At the end of his poem, I told Trevor that there was a famous Irish poet, William Butler Yeats—who was his namesake. And that Trevor's poem reminded me of Yeats' poems. That's when Trevor told me that he was the great-grand-nephew of W.B. Yeats! I was flabbergasted. For a moment the ancestors breathed through Trevor and I was lucky enough to catch it combusting on paper.
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