Revealing ‘depth of his soul’

“Trouble strife and war/They define the world I know.”

Those are the opening lines of the first poem in a volume of poetry Corona del Mar High School student Daniel Ward recently self-published.

Many of the poems are outlets for the pain that confronted him after tragic events in his life, like 9/11, when he sat in Cindy Coon’s fourth-grade class at Harbor View Elementary School.

The quiet, bashful student returned to the school to thank Coon for inspiring him and to tell her he dedicated the book to her. Ward surprised her during a daily school assembly Friday morning, causing Coon’s jaw to drop and tears to well up in her eyes.

“This is the highest honor a teacher can achieve, to have a student come back and acknowledge you,” she said, clutching the hard-bound book in her hands.

“You never know who’s going to be affected when you teach children.”

When he was younger, Coon recalled, Ward was a shy kid and a very diligent student. To this day, he doesn’t share his passion for poetry with many of his high school classmates. Only a couple of friends know he writes poetry, much less that he published it.

The poems in the book take on a variety of subjects. One talks about the comforting feeling of escaping into his mind.

“The time that I wrote the most was when I was emotionally troubled,” Ward said.

Despite the clear confidence it must have taken to make public the inner workings of his emotions through his poetry, Ward was anxious as he presented the book to his old teacher in front of an audience of young children.

He stood with his arms tightly bent at the elbows and chuckled uneasily as he stood and received the adulation of his ecstatic teacher, whom he credits with encouraging him to pursue his writing.

“As you read his book, you can see the depth of his soul,” Coon said.

After the assembly ended, Coon took Ward back to her sixth-grade classroom, where he fielded a dozen eager students’ questions about what types of poetry he wrote, how he got it published and who did the illustrations.

The fact that Ward had accomplished something as prestigious as having his work published at an age — only a few years older than the students in the class — was uplifting for class member Emma Conroy.

“It think it’s really cool. He’s an inspiration to all of us,” Conroy said.

The volume was published by a company owned by a friend of Ward’s family. The family printed 1,000 copies, hoping to give them to family and friends, but they say inquiries from distribution companies have caused them to reconsider.

“It wasn’t going to be a for-profit thing, but now that we’re getting so much interest, we’re starting to rethink that,” said his mother, Christine Nakamoto.

Despite his achievement, Ward remains as humble as he always was, Coon said. A line in the introduction states, “One doesn’t have to be particularly talented to use poetry to express oneself. I know I’m not.”

Although the book is not yet available for purchase, four copies are now in the elementary school’s library.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].