Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet and visual artist Michele Noble from England, who debuted her poetry in our last issue, “Vulnerable.” “Bullied” shows us how cruel children can be to one another and how the human capacity for exclusion starts early. Growing up, on holidays she played with her cousin Gillian, but Hilary was not allowed to play with them because Gillian didn’t like her. Being involved in Hilary’s exclusion, even as a passive enabler, still haunts Michele. “Inside my head, a small girl/ in a nurse’s dress, sits there still,/ a smudge in the dark, no fire, no tree./ Everybody gone, moved on/ but her sad ghost…” When the more sensitive among us are shy and lack confidence, the bully is decisive and bold and ends up setting the tone for the group.
Michele uses repetition and rhythmic accents to emphasize the failure of kindness and her lack of confidence to speak out, which left Hilary out and alone. Alliteration, especially the sibilants in the last stanza, create a subtle, expressive music that slows our reading and makes the injustice hit home. Many of us can relate to the regret of seeing things clearly in hindsight, of wishing we could tell our younger selves what is happening. But it is sometimes these failures that make us more empathetic and kind, if we don’t make a habit of them.
Read “Bullied” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
My name is Michele Noble. I was born in wartime London. My father was away at war but he gave me a touch of blarney, the gift of the gab and my goofy teeth. Sadly I didn’t inherit my mother’s looks!
My schooling was wonderful and I was lucky to be introduced to great literature and art at an early age. I trained as a visual artist and still show pictures but I have always devoured books.
I seriously began to write about 2007. Now I’m an old crone I’m working towards my first collection: Poetry memoirs about my life and times, comic and tragic, the characters I’ve met, and how the world has changed since I was born in 1943.