Lullaby — Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah Asghar writes ‘Lullaby’ as a poem of imagination and comfort. Both of her parents died when she was a small child, so the poem does not remember them directly — it invents a story about them instead, built from what her older sister told her.
Asghar’s mother was Kashmiri and had witnessed violence following the Partition of India; her father emigrated from Pakistan. The couple moved to the United States, where both parents died before Asghar turned five. Much of her writing returns to this loss, to her identity as an orphan, and to the inherited stories that stand in for memories she never had the chance to make herself.
‘Lullaby’ is addressed to Khudejha, Asghar’s sister, and is built from the stories Khudejha told her about their parents. The poem imagines the dead couple waking at opposite ends of the world and travelling towards each other through an imagined tunnel, meeting to dance together all night in the underworld. The dance becomes ‘their way back’ — back to each other, and back to a kind of life.
A lullaby usually soothes a child to sleep. Asghar borrows the title for a poem that soothes grief instead: rather than mourning her parents as lost, she imagines them reunited and dancing, turning an elegy for two dead parents into a comforting bedtime story for herself and her sister.
The poem sits firmly within the Love and Relationships idea, but it explores love that outlives death. Asghar treats her parents’ marriage as continuing beyond the grave, and treats her own identity as something built from that inherited love rather than from direct memory. The relationship at the poem’s centre is a marriage, but the relationship the poem is really about is the one between the orphaned sisters and the parents they must imagine for themselves.
Asghar converts frightening images of death into something beautiful. The phrase ‘dirt skies and worm stars’ takes two images usually linked to burial — dirt and worms — and turns them into a sky full of stars. The poem repeatedly performs this trick: taking the language of the grave and making it glow.
Asghar offers two different versions of light breaking through darkness. To ‘light the underworld’ is bold and complete, as if the parents’ reunion floods the afterlife with brightness. The phrase ‘winks the dark’ is smaller and playful: a detail of the father’s face flashes in the darkness rather than flooding it with light. Placing both images near each other lets Asghar move between celebration and tenderness within the same story.
Asghar writes in free verse, and drops conventional punctuation almost entirely. Without full stops or commas to mark boundaries, the lines run into each other, giving the poem a breathless, dreamlike momentum that suits a story about drifting between worlds.
The structure moves in stages. The opening stanza uses sibilance to echo the softness of a lullaby. Stanzas two and three set up opposites — the parents waking at different ends of the world — that the poem resolves once they meet. A later stanza personifies the planet itself, so the natural world seems to share in the parents’ reunion. The final stanzas move backwards in time, tracing the couple’s journey towards each other rather than forwards towards an ending.
Bright Star by John Keats also links night imagery with a wish for love to outlast time: Keats wants to keep the star’s steadfastness but not its distance: he wishes to stay ‘stedfast’ while ‘Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast’, ‘Awake for ever in a sweet unrest’, listening to her breathing, while Asghar imagines her parents made eternal through the story she tells about them after death. Both poems use the night sky to talk about permanence.
Love After Love by Derek Walcott offers the closest comparison in mood: Walcott’s speaker finds peace by welcoming back the self they had abandoned, and Asghar’s speaker finds peace by imagining her parents welcomed back to each other. Both poems turn loss into a form of quiet celebration.
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath explores a parent-child bond from the opposite direction: Plath’s speaker is a new mother uncertain how to claim her baby as her own, while Asghar is a daughter who must imagine a bond with parents she barely knew. Comparing the two brings out how differently love between parent and child can be built.
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus shows another child building identity from an imperfect parent: Antrobus explores how his father’s love and struggles shaped him, just as Asghar builds her own identity from her parents’ inherited story. Both poems treat a parent’s love as something a child has to work to understand.
‘Lullaby’ works well for both parts of the poetry question. If it is the printed poem, its unusual central image — two dead parents dancing together in the underworld — gives plenty to compare against an unseen poem about love, memory or loss. If chosen for the second part, its short, exact phrases such as ‘their way back’ and ‘dirt skies and worm stars’ are easy to memorise and instantly recognisable, so they can anchor a detailed answer without the poem in front of you.