Addressed to the poet's sister, the poem retells her stories of their dead parents, imagining them waking at opposite ends of the earth and meeting to dance all night in the underworld.
How Asghar's free verse, soothing sounds, contrasts that are resolved, and images of night, light and the underworld turn grief for lost parents into a celebration of their love.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'henna-dyed hair', 'light the underworld', 'winks the dark', 'dirt sky & worm / Stars', 'their way back'.
Form: free verse without conventional punctuation, addressed to the poet's sister, with soft, sibilant sounds that suit a lullaby, contrasts that are set up and then resolved, a personified planet, and last stanzas that move back in time.
Context: Fatimah Asghar (born 1990), a South Asian Muslim American poet and screenwriter, co-creator of the series Brown Girls; Asghar's parents, a Kashmiri mother who witnessed violence after Partition and a father from Pakistan, emigrated to the United States and had both died before Asghar was five; and the poem's addressee, Asghar's sister Khudejha, whose stories about their parents it retells.
Links within the cluster: Morning Song (parents, children and night), The Perseverance (parents and identity), Bright Star (love and death under the night sky) and Now (a moment of perfect joy).
In 2024 students chose it for a satisfying relationship and found two in it: the dead parents' love for each other and the sisters' support for each other.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about grief, family or memory: compare how each poem finds comfort in loss.
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.
