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