The speaker remembers her baby brother's birth and naming ceremony as the moments her grandfather's decline began, the newborn gaining a name as the old man began to forget his own.
How Lola's short poem, mathematical language, stark similes and closing couplet balance birth against death in the cycle of life.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'new-born brother', 'two stopwatches', 'naming ceremony', 'a body cut open', 'autopsy', 'The pause between each sip elongated', 'crowned', 'My grandfather's brain began to forget his'.
Form: ten lines in three stanzas: an opening couplet that runs on into the second stanza, a middle stanza slowed by pauses and a shocking simile, and a closing couplet that balances the baby's name against the grandfather's forgetting.
Context: Theresa Lola (born 1994 in Lagos, Nigeria), who moved to London at thirteen and was Young People's Laureate for London in 2019–20; In Search of Equilibrium (2019), her first collection, a study of death and grief in which many poems mourn her grandfather, who had Alzheimer's disease; and the grandfather the poem calls a mathematician, who understands the equation that balances a birth against a death.
OCR set this poem in June 2025 beside Jackie Kay's Margaret's Moon, on life and death: most saw Lola's realistic, mathematical view set against the unseen poem's gentler, hopeful one, and the best answers explored the stopwatches and the blunt image of the autopsy; in 2024 it was a very popular choice for part (b), on how youth and age differ.
Links within the cluster: Prayer (a birth and a death linked), Tea With Our Grandmothers (mourning a grandparent), Out, Out— (loss) and Baby Song (sadness at the moment of birth).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about a grandparent's decline, memory loss, or the cycle of birth and death.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
