A thirteen-year-old boy is stopped by police minutes from home, told he fits the description of a man, and recognises one of the officers as the man who once told his primary school that the children were all supernovas.
How Femi's second person and future tense, the extended metaphor of stars, supernovas and black holes, and the clash between the officer's two views of the boy show prejudice darkening a child's bright future.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'You will be four minutes from home', 'cornered by an officer', 'You fit / the description of a man?', 'Thirteen, you’ll tell him: you’re thirteen', 'a Wednesday assembly about being little stars', 'an horizon in the east / of his smile', 'you were all supernovas', 'he will see you powerless', 'You will watch the two men cast lots for your organs', 'dying stars / on the verge of becoming black holes'.
Form: free verse in the second person and the future tense, each stanza opening with what you will do, the first ending on the repeated thirteen, with italics at key moments and an extended metaphor of stars running from the second stanza to the last.
Context: Caleb Femi (born 1990), who came from Nigeria to London as a child and grew up on the North Peckham estate, where ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was killed in 2000; Poor (2020), his first collection, poems and his own photographs about young Black boys growing up in Peckham; his years as a secondary English teacher and as London's first Young People's Laureate; and the stop and search of young Black boys that the poem describes.
Links within the cluster: Boat Stealing (boyhood and the loss of innocence), Colonization in Reverse (migrant lives in London), Songs for the People (hope for children and young people) and Honour Killing (prejudice and its consequences).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a young person judged by others, childhood promise and what becomes of it, or power and the police.
A popular choice for part (b) in 2024: examiners saw answers explore the supernova image and how the police stop takes away a child's freedom to walk home safely; OCR's mark schemes read the supernova, bright yet dying, as the harm a community's conflicts do to its children.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
