Behind the Poet’s Pen: Nicholas Trandahl on Writing “After the Last Supper”
By Nicholas Trandahl
You can read Nicholas Trandahl’s Pushcart nominated poem at our literary journal here:
A note from the editor:
Dear Reader,
When I first read Nicholas Trandahl’s poem “After the Last Supper,” I cried.
It was late into the night. I was reading poem after poem for our poetry contest. Many moved me. Many made me read them again and again. There were sighs and insights.
Poetry is a beautiful thing and often the closest thing to truth we can find Earthside. It is the human language distilled.
So, it is not wonder why, when the words are strung together—just right—and the truth we seek to glean sings off the page, we mere humans are prone to lose control of our emotions.
“After the Last Supper” did just that for me—not just because it was a poem that came alive on the page—not just because it shimmered truth—but because it made the humanness of Jesus more tangible for me than any memory I could attempt to conjure in the moment or since.
Trandahl’s vision of Jesus is gripping. It’s human and holy. And it holds the soul to sit and ponder who Christ was, why he came, and what he chose to do for us—in his pain and perfection.
What more perfect time to ponder this beauty and sacrifice than in the Advent season, as we wait, anticipate, and prepare our hearts?
Yes, Christ was a baby in the story of Christmas, but he carried the universe, man, and divinity within himself.
May we remember.
And may you savor this poem and these deep insights as a faithful creative and soul.
Merry Christmas,
Kimberly Phinney
Behind the Poet’s Pen: Nicholas Trandahl on Writing “After the Last Supper,” a Pushcart Nominated Poem
By Nicholas Trandahl, award-winning poet and journalist
Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday of 2023, I wrote the first draft of my poem “After the Last Supper.” The poem changed very little in ensuing drafts, with only slight additions. This poem presents a very real “human” Jesus of Nazareth, stepping outside in a twilit Jerusalem after his final meal with his closest companions, prior to his capture in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In “After the Last Supper,” readers witness Jesus struggling with the relatable emotions of doubt, uncertainty, and fear, as he knows the suffering and sacrifice soon to come.
“After the Last Supper” isn’t my first published foray into humanizing and adding relatable realism to omnipotent and mighty religious figures, saints, deities, and prophets. My poetry collections Mountain Song and All the Color, All the Wind take swings at bringing relatability to Saint Gummarus, Saint Hubertus, Saint Anthony, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Hildegard, Siddhartha Guatama, Pope Francis, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, Pope Benedict, and numerous gods and goddess of Greek and Roman antiquity. I do this not as a form of disrespecting or diminishing holy figures, but as a symbol of love for them and connection to them.
As a young man attending Catholic parochial school and eventually serving as an altar boy during mass, the saints and other holy figures, especially Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, seemed almost mythical. They seemed so far beyond human thought and action to me, as to be almost alien in their aspect—unrelatable, intangible. They felt too complex and beyond my understanding that I was unable to hold them, touch them, unable to reach out to them in a moment of need. They were more akin to starlight and complex equations than to something solid I could lean on or cling to in the turmoil of an ocean of anxiety I found myself more and more lost in as I grew older. I couldn’t fathom reaching out to clutch the coarse dusty fabric of Jesus’ robe, feel the warmth of his bare travel-worn feet, even the thickness of his calluses and likely ragged toenails.
But then I became a poet.
With my burgeoning life as a poet, as I passed through my thirties, I became a seeker of inspiration and holiness, oftentimes looking outward into God’s untouched handiwork of the wilderness. There’s been many a lonely mountain ridge and sunlit meadow where I’ve sat, thumbing the beads of my rosary and feeling so much love and gratitude. During this decade, however, I also began to look into these figures of my religious upbringing, at the saints and prophets that inhabit so much space in my mind and heart, but had been silent for so many difficult years.
As I’ve alluded to, the barrier of intangibility and unrelatability kept holy figures at a distance from my life.
As a poet, I endeavor to bring these figures, many of them firmly rooted in history and places we know or have at least heard of, to our realm of earthly human living, sometimes suffering from the same things that plague us: loneliness, uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and pain.
“After the Last Supper” aims to do this—perhaps with more risk than I have before.
In “After the Last Supper,” I wanted readers to smell the wine on Jesus’ breath, to see the crumbs suspended in his coarse beard, to feel the dust from his desert journey to Jerusalem on the coarse weave of his homespun robe, to touch the old calluses on his palms from his work as a carpenter.
Most importantly, though, I want readers to feel the fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt plaguing Jesus Christ in those last hours before his capture by the Romans, the fear of the pain and suffering to come, and the fear of not being able to see and experience more on this earth.
I hope when you read “After the Last Supper,” you will perhaps begin to know Jesus as I know Him, as a true and authentic friend to confide in and to lean on in times of need.
Your fellow seeker,
Nick
“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” —LUKE 22:42
You can read Nicholas Trandahl’s Pushcart nominated poem at our literary journal here:
NICHOLAS TRANDAHL
CONTRIBUTOR
Nicholas Trandahl is an award-winning poet, journalist, outdoorsman, and veteran residing in northern Wyoming, where he currently also serves as mayor of a small town. He has had five poetry collections published and has also been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Trandahl has been awarded the Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, he works as poetry editor for The Dewdrop literary journal and as a regular contributor for The Way Back to Ourselves literary journal, while also serving as chairman of the annual Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest. His new poetry collection, Purgatory, debuts in January of 2024.