The speaker recalls that the first words he heard were his father's prayer at his birth, then remembers sitting at his dying mother's hospital bed, unable to pray, whispering his thanks and love.
How Kunial's echoes of George Herbert's poem on prayer, short sentences and silences link birth and death, faith and language, and the limits of what words can do.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'First heard words, delivered to this right ear', 'Allah hu Akbar – God is great – by my father', 'God's breath in man returning to his birth', 'chimes with heav'n and earth', 'my mum on a Hereford hospital bed', 'say what prayer couldn't end', 'I made an animal noise, hurled language's hurt', 'by midnight her rings were off', 'I stayed on. At her bed.', 'time and rhythm flatlining', 'Thank you I love you thank you', 'She stared on, ahead. I won't know if she heard.'.
Form: three five-line stanzas of unrhymed lines that chime with each other, moving from the speaker's birth to his mother's death, with Herbert's line set into the middle, and broken, spaced-out lines and short sentences at the end.
Context: Zaffar Kunial (born about 1987 in Birmingham), the son of an English mother and a Kashmiri father, poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2014; his first collection, Us (2018), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; George Herbert, the seventeenth-century priest-poet whose poem calls prayer God's breath in man returning to his birth; and his father's Muslim faith, in the Arabic words of the second line.
In part (b), suggested for sad thoughts (2025), where OCR points to the short, sharp sentences near the end that show language failing ('I made an animal noise'), and for a parent and a child in the specimen ('mouth at her ear').
Links within the cluster: Equilibrium (birth and death together), Tea With Our Grandmothers (family, faith and the languages of older relatives), Happy Birthday Moon (what we learn from a parent) and Out, Out— (death and silence).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about a parent's death, faith, or what words can and cannot say.
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.
