With less space to fill than a tiny tweet, placards printed with poems of 50 words or less replaced ads on Seattle Metro buses for the past year, offering poignant and distilled insights into the nature of home.

Islanders Merna Ann Hecht, Yvonne Higgins Leach, Carlos Adams-Tres and Seth Zuckerman were among the Northwest poets chosen in the wide-reaching public arts campaign — Poetry on Buses — sponsored by 4Culture and Metro Transit.

The collaborative project received over 600 submissions from poets of all ages and numerous cultures. Carlos, 10, was one of the youngest poets whose work rode the buses for thousands of riders to read. When the year-long program kicked off in the fall of 2014, the event organizers invited Carlos to read his poem “Oh Brother” at the opening ceremony. In front of 800 participating poets and their families packed into the Moore Theatre, he became a bit of a hero, according to 4Culture spokesperson Christina DePaolo.

“Carlos became a sensation at the event,” she said. “He had stage fright and gave it several tries before he read the poem through. The crowd gave him their all, rooting for him.”

Tamar Benzikry-Stern, 4Culture’s public art project manager, said she was grateful to Carlos and his parents for sharing his honest vulnerability, believing his courage had a large effect on the evening and exemplified an important mission of the project: to foster community.

“It was dark. He came in and out of the spotlight, and people were cheering, saying, ‘We love you, Carlos,'” she said. “It did something to the evening to promote community. We felt like a community around him. It was quite special.”

Eventually, Carlos did read his poem, written when he was 8 years old:

“In my house lives my brother, my little brother, he annoys me like crazy, he makes weird faces, he tries to bite me, he tries to lick me too, and if you have a little brother, I’ve got empathy for you.”

Hailed as a much-beloved program, Poetry on Buses began in 1992. Last year, the scope and reach of the 23-year-old project broadened with an online poetry portal, dedicated exposure on four RapidRide lines in addition to city-wide buses and bus stops, and community poetry workshops focused on building community within and across multilingual cultures. Benzikry-Stern spearheaded the ambitious reboot.

“We made a number of changes to the program, most of which are a reflection of time,” Benzikry-Stern said. “In previous years, we had 52 poems. Now, with a digital presence, we have 365 poems, and we recorded a poet of the week. We also had poets writing in English, Russian, Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese.”

Benzikry-Stern’s team hired poetry planner Roberto Ascalon to pick a topic and develop poetry workshops with a community liaison who often taught traditional forms of writing poetry. Ascalon chose “Writing Home” as the theme, which Benzikry-Stern said was spot on.

“Robbie nailed the theme,” she said. “Home of present and past, imagery through words that fostered open conversation. Poetry can do that, and exploring it with other people builds community. Poetry can be an accessible art form.”

To select the final poems, an esteemed panel of seven poets culled through the hundreds of submissions, selecting what would fill the bus placards and website.

Vashon writer and poet Zuckerman was a featured poet of the week in October. He writes a weekly column for the Olympia-based non-governmental organization Climate Solutions, and said he first read the ad for the project while riding a bus. Though he never found his poem on a bus, he did say he saw it “at the bus stop for the C Line RapidRide at the Fauntleroy ferry dock, where it hung for the better part of a year.”

His poem “Enclosures Not Permitted” describes a yearning for his family home in California:

“Sun blazing, muggy air babbling with unfamiliar tongues. In the house, cool and dark, I scribble to my grown sister. Lucky one. She got to stay in California. I’ll fold the blue sheet into an envelope wishing I could wrap myself inside it and mail myself back home.”

In July, fellow island poet Hecht became a poet of the week, reading her poem “Across Borders.” She wrote:

“I braid my grandmother’s old world recipes into each new day, join others who dream of beloved hands slapping tortillas, mixing injera dough, knowing scents and flavors travel with us across borders — pickled herring, chili peppered stews, samosa, pita, challah — our hearts full with pungent spices of home.”

Hecht teaches Stories of Arrival: Youth Voices Poetry Project at Foster High School in Tukwila, one of the most linguistically diverse high schools in the nation. She also submitted eight poems by her refugee and immigrant students, who wrote about homes they left behind in war-torn countries. Some of her students, who received a stipend for their poems, read on the stage at the Moore Theatre at the 2014 opening night.

“There were three students, including a boy in a wheelchair from Nepal,” Hecht said. “They went from refugee to main stage. It was the best day of my life, and they were thrilled. (Imagine) come to America and get paid for a poem.”

For Higgins Leach, the quality of home is expressed in the simple breathing of her loved ones nearby. In “Why I Am Complete,” she writes: “In this cove-tucked cabin I call home, I begin the last third of my life. My young adult daughters breathe steadily in the next room. The man it took me a lifetime to find does the same beside me. All this breathing — in and out — here, with mine.”

Higgins Leach, who recently published her book of poems, “Another Autumn,” said she was honored to be part of a project that brought poems to the local community in such an innovative way. She also attended opening night at the Moore, calling the evening phenomenal.

“The theater was full,” she said. “They had students perform spoken word poetry, and individual poets from all backgrounds and of all ages read. It was fantastic to have that much energy around for poetry.”

Carlos remembers a different feeling from that evening.

“It was terrifying,” he said. “I thought I was never going to write again, but I wrote the next day.”

He still writes today, and said his poems usually come from his experiences. What happens becomes a poem, he said, based on thoughts, events, ideas, possible things, adding that he has a lot of ideas. He is currently writing a book of poems, but his passion now centers on geology.

“My first poem was the one I submitted to Poetry on the Bus,” he said. “It was the only one I could submit because all of my other poems were about feelings, nature or specifically geology and didn’t fit the topic.”

When Poetry on Buses launches its 2016 campaign during National Poetry month in April, Carlos may or may not submit another poem, saying he might want to stop at some point. As for “Oh Brother,” he said he doesn’t like the poem now because it is about his brother being annoying, and he loves him.

“He is older now,” Adams-Tres said, “and not as annoying as he used to be. I can’t even remember the last time he bit me … wait, no. He did just bite my hair recently. But anyway, he is great now. Well, okay, a little annoying but I love him. He is my brother.”

To read all 365 poems archived on 4Culture’s “Poetry on Buses” website, including all of the ones mentioned in this story, visit poetryonbuses.org.