Who wrote "My name is Sarah" poem?

Cafe Society
1

So, this poem has been online for years. Interesting enough, it is most commonly found copy-pasted on author’s profiles on Fanfiction.net. The poem (with slight variations) reads as it follows:

My name is Sarah, I am but three.
My eyes are swollen, I cannot see.
I must be stupid, I must be bad.
What else could have made my daddy so mad?

I can’t speak at all, I can’t do a wrong
Or else I’m locked up all the day long.
I wish I were better, I wish I weren’t ugly.
Then maybe my mommy would still want to hug me.

When I’m awake, I find I’m all alone,
The house is empty, my folks aren’t home,
When my Mommy gets back, I’ll try to be nice,
So maybe I won’t get a whipping tonight.

Don’t make a sound, I just heard a car
My Daddy’s back from Charlie’s bar.
I hear him curse as my name he calls,
I press myself against the wall.

I try to hide from his evil eyes.
I’m so afraid I start to cry.
He finds me weeping, he shouts ugly words,
he says it’s my fault that he suffers at work.

He slaps me and hits me, and yells at me more,
I finally get free and I run for the door.
He’s already locked it and I start to bawl,
Then he takes me and throws me against the wall.

I fall to the floor with my bones nearly broken
And my dad continues with more bad words spoken.
“I’m sorry!” I scream, but it’s much too late.
His face has been twisted into unimaginable hate.

The hurt and the pain, again and again,
Oh please God have Mercy! Oh please let it end!And he finally stops and he heads for the door,
Whilst I lay there motionless, sprawled on the floor.

My name is Sarah, I am but three
Tonight my daddy murdered me.

Any ideas about the author? The earliest Internet source that I could find dates back to 2004, so it has been around for at least 18 years:

But once again, the poster doesn’t appear to be the author, just somebody sharing the poem.

It was also prominently featured in “Scary for kids” website, in 2012:

Any ideas? Though most likely it is an anonymous Internet author. Had an established author written it, they would have come out by now. Thank you in advance.

2

PoemHunter.com attributes it to Kikiyo Hugarashi.

I have my doubts. The poet’s biography at that site says:

Well…for starters I hate girly girls and people who are preps.I am just crazy, wierd, nice and i guess smart. If people call me that i dont care. If people spread rumors about me i dont care. I try not to be a snitch, i used to be. anyway I love writing poems and if people hate them they dont get what the meassage is. sometimes i talk randome. and randomeness is awsome.anyway i can go on and on and on…but If you wanna know more meassage me i reply to anybody. I hope all of you could read my poems. ^.^

To me, that blurb does not sound like someone who would have written “My Name is Sarah.”

3

The Wayback machine says it was Gayle Jones Staples. Here’s the original page it was on, in all its early-2000s web glory. I highly recommend muting - words cannot describe the atrocity of the auto-playing music.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030405015824/http://www.byjoy.com/MyNameIsSarah.html

4

Ugh, I hope this doesn’t come across as thread-shitting but I detest that kind of drek. Child abuse is a horrible thing, but let’s address it in an adult manner.

5

True, but really, if you’re going to write a poem in a child’s voice, word it like a child would speak. “I am but three” is not something a child would say.

6

You could take it a step further and say that a 3 year old couldn’t write poetry, in the first place.

7

This is missing the point. I did not say that poetry in a child’s voice was unrealistic. Just that if you are going to write a poem like that, use a child’s style of speaking. There is such a thing as artistic control.

9

Here’s a version from 1986 Poem Captures Terror of Child Abuse when a thirty-five year old today would be negative 4 years old

10

FWIW, Snopes traced another version back to 1996 – by someone calling herself “Misty”.

They evidently should have went back further.

11

Whoever wrote that poem should be deeply ashamed and I hope that they are. OTTOMH for a much better rhyming story of child abuse try Suzanne Vega’s Luca. It conveys a much more realistic, and thus much more frightening and unpleasant, look at child abuse. It also has artistic merit rather than being an insult to the reader.

12

1986 as the origin date means it may very well be based on the song whixh Vega sang at concerts starting in 1984

13

Huh, so Melba says her eleven year old grand daughter wrote it? That could be true. Or it could be that somebody realized that their poem was crap but might get praise if they claimed an eleven year old wrote it. As we should know the book Go Ask Alice and a bunch of other were written by adults and passed off as actual diaries of girls with tragic lives. I have not researched the poem King Heroin. I first enountered that one in school and was told it was found by the body of an addict who had commited suicide. Considering the many other lies they told us in school (NOTE- I do not mean teaching us only part of the story or the story from a slanted perspective. I mean urban legends that had been debunked even then.) I have my doubts.