Three DHS students win Hot Poetry contest

By Charlotte Baker

DAYTON–Three of the five Pacific Northwest 2024 Hot Poetry contest winners, Justina Abrahamson, Solomon Brenner, and Logan Berg, are local High School seniors.

The Pacific Northwest Hot Poetry contest is in coordination with the non-profit "Hanford Challenge" based in Seattle and Tri-Cities. Poem topics focused on nuclear waste, and the history of atomic energy and weapons in Richland. Each winner received a $100 check from the organization for their winning verses.

"I'm really proud of our seniors representing little old Dayton High School and competing with obviously a much bigger school," said Martin Surridge Dayton Middle School and High School English, History and Drama teacher. Surridge went to the Hanford Challenge Gala in Seattle to accept the awards on behalf of Dayton High School and spoke, with people there, about our poetry writing in the classroom.

The other two of the five selected winners, were college students from the University of Washington.

Their non-profit provides legal representation to nuclear employees and whistleblowers at Hanford who work at the most contaminated nuclear cleanup and most toxic landfill site in North America.

The Reality

By Justina Abrahamson, Dayton High School

From the Cold War to the cold days in our nation

We're still discovering radioactive sludge here

With the people in our country saying this is an abomination

With the people in our nation collecting horrible disease near

From the underground tanks to straight into the ground

Near the Yakama Nation from the Columbia River

Poisonous waste in the river ingested by the creature

From the people of this land we have a moral obligation

To fix this: Growing up on the Spokane Reservation

My sisters tribes have suffered way too long with this wound

The Mother Earth is dying and we are the killers

If we don't change our actions there will be

detriment to generations of all mankind

So please hear our cries and stop to realize

That all the people want is to be prioritize

So please hear our cries and stop to realize

That all the people want is to be apologize

So please stop and hear our cries to realize

That all the people want is to be recognize

Cope

By Solomon Brenner, Dayton High School

The drive for power

Destruction with an everlasting effect

Sick storage slandering the ground beneath

How may we mend the defiant defect

The poisoned Columbia certain to seethe

Wilderness untamed

Companies unblamed

Under the blast

Past

Aimed to have remained an unclaimed name, yet a shamed, maimed name for all of history

The desolation The insubordination

The unwillingness to scour

Legacy of Atoms

Logan Berg, Dayton High School

A legacy of atoms in silent gloom

Where history's whispers run dark and deep

From reactor's heart, a sinister boom

Beneath the soil, secrets seep

Forging futures in nuclear light

A haunting echo of a broken dream

A legacy cast in radioactive plight

Ignoring the rivers silent scream

Hanford's secrets buried deep below

In order to erase the memory of the desolate place

For in this poisoned soil chemicals flow

Leaving a mess for the future to face

We began to cleanse the scars of our atomic past

But with progress came a hidden blight

We sit on our hands as the leakage moves fast

Continuing to fester without a fight