David Harris hasn’t forgotten what it was like to sleep among the falling leaves during his three years of homelessness. And now he shares his memories with bright-eyed and curious teenagers who come to Washington to learn about poverty and homelessness.

David works at The Pilgrimage, a program of Church of the Pilgrims that invites hundreds of youths every year to visit for an intensive experience of service and reflection. For a week, the young people sleep in the church and during the day fan out into the city to serve in soup kitchens, do yard work for low-income elderly and disabled people, deliver meals to home-bound AIDS patients and sort cans at the Capital Area Food Bank.

They return to the church in the evenings for reflection and Bible discussions that relate passages written 2,000 years ago to the experiences they’ve had that day. David, an accomplished poet who has been published in the newspaper Street Sense and the book Street Verses, helps them put their thoughts and feelings into words. “I’m a facilitator,” he says. “I give instructions in the different formats they can use for their reflections — poem, essay, story.” David shares with them his own experiences of living on the streets. “Many find it very moving, because they don’t get a lot of chance to talk to the people in the soup kitchens to see how they feel about the volunteers and being served, so they get that perspective from me.”

Leading the class has also been a moving experience for David. It has built his self-esteem and improved his own writing, he says. But most important, the young people who “care enough to come on a mission trip and serve the homeless” inspire him. In turn, many students cite David as their inspiration and choose him as the topic of their reflections.

Over the five years that David has been guiding the Poetry and Writing reflection, he’s noticed that the teens’ writings often show strong feelings of compassion — they’re surprised to discover that the people they’re serving “are interesting and kind-hearted, and not so different from themselves.”

Where I Came From
excerpt of poem by David Harris*

Yesterday,
I marched in a church parade;
children toted signs urging passersby to
help the poor;

ragged men on sidewalks
waved and cheered;
I greeted each by name.

This was the place which owned me,
where I slept restlessly in a cardboard mansion.

This morning, I bathed beneath
steamy water as my cup of tea
cooled on the kitchen counter;
I’ve escaped and graduated,
returning only as a tourist
but tonight,
a thousand friends and colleagues
will sleep among the brittle softness
of falling leaves,
and I will
remember.

*To read this and other David Harris poems visit his website.