Voorhees resident Benjamin Dias selected in New Jersey Association for Gifted Children poetry contest
Voorhees resident Benjamin Dias was selected as a Top 2 winner by the New Jersey Association for Gifted Children in a poetry contest recently held by the group.
This statewide poetry contest was open to all New Jersey students in grades 9–12, and his poem was selected from over 300 entries as a winner.
Dias submitted the poem at age 15 while in ninth grade, and it was published on both the NJAGC website and the group’s online newsletter “Promise.”
The association congratulates Dias on his writing skills and looks forward to receiving works from him in the future.
The poem is as follows:
He and Me
He turns to me,
His eyes raging red
Yet deep behind the blue of his iris
I see the blue ocean churning.
A mist coats his eyes
And frustration pours out in the form of precipitation.
I stare back, gazing at the emotions unfolding before me
As they manifest into physical form.
At first I shy away,
But then offer my hand
And try to pry him away from his pain.
Instead, we travel to his thoughts
And the setting changes, the world blurring around us
And the hurt goes away, recedes to his depths;
And now when I look into his eyes
I see the storm settled
And a cave with a small clearing
With a glistening lake of serenity in its center
And after moments of standing there
The first pebble falls from one of the stalactites — -
Hanging like a chandelier from the roof of the cave.
The pebble penetrates the calm surface of the water
And sends ripples through it.
Soon the ceiling is crumbling
Like the mask of calmness he put on not too long ago,
And then, the world goes dark.
When the lights return I realize:
The lights are burning, the lights are fire,
And when I look beside me he’s not there
But he’s everywhere and I know his anger is controlling him
It’s the coal that fuels his passion
But most of all I feel the pressure he emits
Almost like a glow from a fire fly
It’s constricting me, the pressure, and I can’t think,
I just feel, but all I feel is him
My thoughts, our thoughts are jumbled and clustered
They are like ants, their paths seem random but at the root there is one central focus.
My central focus is about him.
All he wants is to be accepted for who he is
for what he is and can do
and he above all can’t tolerate those who claim to believe in him
because he feels he can’t do anything himself
to live up to unfair expectations
and live in a world that he feels has no spot for him
And then a clangor is heard and the world shatters
falling apart piece by piece
like a window being struck by a baseball
And left behind is white space and him.
In a rectangle outlining his height and width
there are faint, shimmering lines
and behind him a sparkling grey tint appears
Within the borders of those shimmering lines.
As I peer closer I realize that his features are like my own
And when I move my hand, his copies my action.
He steps out of the rectangular bubble
And gets compressed into a thin thread
Then the thread shoots forward into my mind.
My head snaps back and when it comes forward, the outline
of that rectangle becomes a clear gold
And the background is obviously made of a metallic silver.
Only then did I realize that he was, no, is me.
I guess we are in fact a we, he and me.
