James Blume ’19 earned a Bronze Medal for Poetry in the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English statewide writing contest for high school students. The award ceremony was held on Thursday, April 27 in Scotch Plains, N.J., where the winning poems were performed by trained orators. James also won a 2017 Scholastic Silver Key for Poetry. His creative nonfiction has been published in the national print magazine, Teen Ink. Enjoy this wonderful poem.
“Transubstantiation” by James Blume ’19
If I removed my sandals
and walked barefoot on ground,
would my feet burn from radiation,
Or is this site sacred–
would I feel nothing?
An obelisk juts out of the dust, crudely
stacked with black stones and a bronze plaque
as if a cairn for thirsty wanderers.
It is all that remains in the duneless
mirage of a drying sea.
My father’s eyes are glass blown,
swirls of trapped blue like an ancient
water clock measuring a forgotten time.
I’d like to forget time.
To have known
him when he was younger.
He refused to eat
the stones that could become bread.
Stones were stones.
Bread was bread.
The same day my parents
married the Trinity Testing turned White Sand
into glass in the New Mexico desert.
The uprooted earth shattered into
isotopic shards of stainless glass,
which shimmered under an aimless light.
When he wed my mother in Trinity Church did he see
those still living of the land of the shadow of death?
As he laughed and toasted to bread and wine
did he hunger no more? Did he transubstantiate?
Or did the stones remain stones in his mouth?