The Poet’s Bench

M Mehran

In the heart of Willowbrook Park, near the old fountain where children still tossed pennies for wishes, stood a weathered wooden bench. Its paint had long since faded to a pale gray, and the carved initials of decades of young lovers ran across it like secret graffiti. Yet, in the evenings, the bench came alive with words.

For years, people swore that if you sat there long enough, lines of poetry would rise in your mind—verses you had never thought of before, words strung together like pearls on a silver thread. Some dismissed it as imagination. Others said it was the spirit of Arthur Gray, the town’s most beloved poet, who had spent every afternoon of his final years sitting on that very bench, scribbling in a battered notebook until the sun sank behind the hills.

Maya, a high-school English teacher, had grown up hearing the stories but had never believed them. She admired Arthur Gray—his slim collection Rivers of Quiet Fire was still studied in her classes—but she chalked the bench legends up to small-town folklore. That changed one September evening.

She had just finished a long day of teaching and wandered through Willowbrook Park, grading papers as she walked. The bench was empty, glowing faintly in the last stretch of sunlight. She sat down absentmindedly, balancing a stack of essays on her lap.

It happened so suddenly she nearly dropped her papers.

Words. Whole stanzas. They weren’t in her voice—they felt older, wiser, and yet intimately hers:

“The river keeps a memory
of every stone it has touched.
And we—
we are only stones carried once,
hoping the water remembers.”

She gasped. She wasn’t writing. She wasn’t even thinking of poems. But there it was, like a voice placed directly into her heart.

Startled, she scribbled the lines onto the margin of a student’s essay. The words flowed, tumbling faster than she could catch them. By the time the park lamps flickered on, she had covered three pages with verses that seemed to rise from the wood beneath her.

The next morning, she showed them to her colleague, Mr. Patel, who had taught in Willowbrook for thirty years. He read them quietly, then looked at her with wide eyes.

“These,” he said slowly, “sound like Arthur Gray.”

Maya laughed nervously, but when she returned to the bench the following evening, the same thing happened. New lines, different rhythms, yet always carrying that deep pulse of Gray’s unmistakable style.

Soon, word spread. Students whispered that their teacher had been “chosen.” Retired librarians dug out old recordings of Arthur Gray’s readings, comparing them to Maya’s sudden stream of poems. Local reporters began hovering around the park, hoping to witness the phenomenon.

But it was not performance. The bench did not work for everyone. When others sat there, the wood remained silent. Yet for Maya, the words came night after night, as if the spirit of the poet had chosen her as a vessel.

One evening, she brought her notebook instead of her students’ essays and asked aloud, “Arthur… why me?”

The fountain trickled nearby, leaves rustled in the autumn wind, and then—clear as any line she had ever heard—came the reply:

“Because poets are never gone.
We only need new hands
to carry the pen.”

Maya’s throat tightened. She wasn’t a poet—at least, she had never dared to call herself one. She was a teacher, a reader, someone who admired the beauty of language but never believed she could shape it herself.

Yet the bench seemed to disagree.

Over the following weeks, she began compiling the poems into a small manuscript. She titled it Echoes on the Bench. When she nervously read a few verses aloud at the town’s autumn festival, the crowd fell silent. Some wept quietly. Others swore they heard Arthur’s voice carried on the wind.

The local newspaper ran the headline: “Willowbrook Poet Lives On Through Teacher.” Bookstores in nearby towns began requesting copies of the manuscript. Even publishers reached out, curious about the strange story of inspiration flowing from an old bench.

But Maya wrestled with doubt. Was she truly writing? Or was she just a mouthpiece for someone else, long gone? Did it matter?

One late November night, with the first flakes of snow falling across the park, she sat once more on the bench. Her hands were cold, ink smudged across her fingers, but the words came anyway. They came softer now, slower, like a grandfather saying goodbye.

“All poems are borrowed.
All voices shared.
When you write, child,
it is not only me.
It is you, too.”

The bench seemed to exhale. The wood beneath her no longer hummed with that strange electric energy. The silence was complete. Maya realized the gift had ended.

But it left her with something more precious: belief. Not just in Arthur Gray’s lingering spirit, but in herself. She could write—not as a vessel, not as a ghost’s echo, but as Maya, the teacher who had always loved words.

The following spring, her first original poem was published in the Willowbrook Chronicle. It was simple, about the sound of chalk against a blackboard and the way students’ eyes lit up when they discovered a new story. Yet it was wholly hers.

The bench remained in the park, weathered and quiet. Tourists sat on it, hoping for magic, but it no longer whispered verses. Some said Arthur had finally passed on, his work complete. Others believed he had simply given his bench a new guardian.

As for Maya, she never told anyone the exact night the words had stopped. She kept that secret folded inside her like a final poem. For every time she passed the fountain, she felt a quiet gratitude.

In the end, the bench had not made her a poet. It had only shown her that she already was one.