Poetry Competition 2023

School Years 8-10 Winner

“The Missing Charm” by Miriam Natasha Ramagge

I am the missing charm on the bracelet,

The owl,

The panda,

The cheetah,

The Hyena,

The Vampire.

I am the invisible charm,

The lost link,

Forgotten.

They all giggle,

Their elbows hit my chest as they push me away.

Mocking glances as I sit alone on the bus,

Snide stares as I eat at an empty table,

A ghost girl sits in my seat,

Hyenas prefer to laugh in a pack,

A solitary laugh is only a cry.

Even my diary tells my secrets,

The china doll on my wardrobe waiting to tell,

Her rosy lips frozen in place,

I have no one to trust.

The missing thread in the plait,

Green,

Gold,

Red,

Blue,

Pink.

I am the invisible string,

The lost thread,

Forgotten.

My words are there but there is no mouth to tell them,

The missing charm lies between my absent words,

An empty space but nobody wants it filled,

No body to make my excuses.

Even the meanest wolf hunts in a pack,

My invisible friend refuses to hold my hand.

I am a disease,

But is isolation contagious?

Not invisible.

Only forgotten,

But nobody wants to remember.

  

Judge Charlie Durante’s Comments:

 “Miriam Natasha Ramagge with The Missing Charm.  Even though we are all connected in the twentieth-first century, many of us suffer from some kind of loneliness or feelings of worthlessness or rejection.  Miriam’s poem is a powerful statement of isolation.  Her speaker feels rejected, invisible, unvalued, and extremely solitary.  The animals in the first stanza are either ungregarious or avoided by others.  The feeling of being unwanted and unacknowledged reaches a climax when the speaker says, ‘a ghost sits in my seat.’  Even the less attractive animals hunt in packs and share food.  

 This poem is full of heart-rending images which reflect a deep feeling of being unwanted and exiled from the human family.  Miriam has succeeded in conveying the morbid solitude which has undermined the person’s self-esteem and made her into the ‘missing charm on the bracelet.’   A very mature poem for someone Miriam’s age. Well done!”