Poet's Corner: Maris

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We’re back for another installment of Poet’s Corner, our brand new series featuring poetry written for you, by you! We’ll be sharing your poetry throughout the year, and it’s totally up to you what you write about. If you want to get involved, let us know over at @NCS or fill in our writer application form. Today, we’ve got a poem by Clary which will get your taste buds tingling...

Maris

There’s a place down the road

Between the girls’ school, the boys’ school and the bus stop

Where uniform clad teens venture clutching

Tiny purses or loose change.

They’re not very social.

Huge doner meat spins behind the counter

As MTV blasts on a TV behind us

That hangs above a greasy leather sofa.

But oh, when you get that bag

Of £2 worth of chips,

Thin, long, and coated in paprika

You would move mountains for that first crunchy bite.

It’s places like these we come to

Devoting our focus, bouncing our knees

Through chemistry class, thinking of when we’ll taste

That salty storm in a paper bag.

You can smell it from a mile off. It’s impossible

To have a bag all to yourself, because someone

Has just smelt it from the other side of market

Where we all wait for our buses

And now they’re your best friend for as long as it takes to get a handful.

What that place meant to us.

Rowdy teens drifting through school, living for a lunchtime gossip session

Or football game, desperate for a mouthful of something we can call home, and comfort

And goodness. We love those fries,

From the precocious year 13s with UCAS forms to finish and hair to plait

To the year seven boys who mock and shout

And drop their homework on the puddles in the pavement.

It’s a symbol of belonging, a badge of pride

A stamp of our town that’s universally hated and nicknamed rude portmanteaus

Until it serves us chips from a shop with the O missing from the sign.

Paprika. That damn paprika smells better than you could even imagine.
 

Got a poem you want to share? Let us know @NCS or fill in our writer application form.