Class S2

Warm like a woolly hat

Like a pair of slippers

Like a gas fire

Like my mum in bed

Like a hot water bottle

Like hot chocolate

Warm like sunshine

Like Gambia

Like your knees in the hot sun

Like bees to come

Warm like our new school

This week’s poem is by Year 9 and 10 students from Piper Hill School in Manchester, a school for students with severe learning difficulties. Their teacher, Linda Otten, tells me it was written after studying Ted Hughes’s poem “The Warm and the Cold”. It will be the only group poem you’ll see in my column this term, but I thought it well worth looking at what can be achieved. Group poems are great fun in the making and can help students gain confidence to go on to write more poems, both together and individually.

A spirit of enjoyment certainly flows through this poem and the young writers have found some striking images to show exactly what warmth means to them.

Class S2 receives Fatso in a Red Suit by Matthew Sweeney (Faber). Submitted by Linda Otten of Piper Hill School, 200 Yew Tree Lane, Northenden, Manchester M23 0FF, who receives a set of Poetry Society posters with teachers’ notes. For Poetry Society events, ring 0171 240 2133.

Jo Shapcott is the Poetry Society’s poet on the Internet: hhtp.www.PoetrySoc.com