Poetry Competition 2024 School Years 6-7 Winner New Beginnings

by Lewis Bennett

The days can be low, the days can be high
At the end of the day, your conscience starts to fly
Blocking out everything that makes you feel your worst
All you want is just to not burst.

People can be kind, People can be cruel
Overexaggerating and making you feel a fool
But besides all that, there’s things that make you feel delighted
And what comes with that are things that make you feel frightened

Descending darkly down a hole, not sure if there’s anything to help you
Always trying to be happy, but truly feeling as down as the colour blue
BOOM, ZAP, CRASH, suddenly you feel dizzy
It feels like you just drank something fizzy

Now that that’s happened, everything’s become simple
Your work doesn’t look like an ancient hieroglyph symbol
Getting work done in a short time has become very easy
Not being awkward has become nice and breezy.

No more procrastination or leaving it till later,
No longer feeling like your own traitor.

Judge’s comment: Years 6-7 Winner
New Beginnings
A poem with a message of positivity and resilience. Great use of repetition in the first lines of the first two stanzas to convey the difficulties felt by the speaker, closely followed by the haunting image of the descent into darkness. The negativity felt by the speaker is clear in the use of similes and onomatopoeia. However the positive turn in stanza 4 is reassuring and lightens the ending leaving us with a sense of achievement and celebration on the part of the speaker. The use of similes in the final lines- “hieroglyph”, “traitor”- is powerful, leaving us with a clear sense of the speaker’s sense of relief at their new-found success.