Prayer — Zaffar Kunial
Prayer — Zaffar Kunial
Prayer is a fiercely personal poem. Zaffar Kunial wrote it in 2018 and published it in his collection Us. Its speaker — recognisably the poet himself — stands at his mother’s deathbed as she nears death from cancer and, in that moment, remembers his own birth. Prayer becomes the thread that links these two extremes: submission, breath, and an attempt to say something language struggles to hold.
The Poet: Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham. His mother was English and his father was Kashmiri and now lives in Lahore. His mixed heritage runs through the subject matter and the shape of his poetry: he writes from inside a British-Kashmiri diaspora family, moving between English and Muslim traditions of faith and language.
Kunial studied at the London School of Economics and won the National Poetry Competition Award in 2011. In 2014 he became poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust and took part in creative commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War. His first collection appeared in the Faber New Poets series. He now lives in West Yorkshire, works as a full-time creative writer for Hallmark cards, and published a volume of cricket poems, Six, in 2019.
Prayer links two life events across generations — the poet’s own birth and his mother’s death. The poem folds time so that these opposite moments, beginning and ending, sit inside the same act of prayer.
Faith, Breath and Loss
The poem opens on deeply personal ground: from its first line, Kunial makes clear this is not a general meditation on prayer but an account of something that happened to him. Early in the poem he uses the Arabic phrase Allah hu Akbar, an expression of submission to the will of God, placing his father’s Muslim inheritance directly inside an English poem. The effect is to hold two languages of faith — English and Arabic — in the same breath, just as the speaker’s own identity holds two cultures together.
As the poem moves toward his mother’s illness, articulation becomes harder. Kunial traces her decline from a cancer diagnosis to the moment her jewellery was removed near the end — a detail so small and physical that it says more than a direct statement of grief could. Faced with this, the poet does not build to a dramatic climax. He simply reiterates his thanks and his love, as if plainer language is the only kind that can survive the moment.
Characteristically, Kunial reaches into the English literary tradition to help him say what feels almost unsayable. He makes an allusion to George Herbert, the seventeenth-century priest-poet, who wrote of ‘God’s breath in man returning to his birth’. Kunial borrows this idea directly: prayer, breath and birth become the same motion, and the moment of his own birth becomes, in the poem, an echo of Herbert’s much older line.
Kunial also reminds us that Herbert rhymes ‘birth’ with ‘heaven and earth’. That chime links a single, private moment of birth to something as vast as the whole created universe — the mortal and the eternal locked together by sound as much as by sense. Borrowing another poet’s rhyme lets Kunial connect his family’s story to a much longer literary history of writing about faith.
The phrase ‘hurled language’s hurt’ captures grief that cannot be spoken calmly. The harsh alliteration and violence of ‘hurled’ suggest an almost animal cry breaking through ordinary words at the moment of his mother’s diagnosis.
Form and Structure
Prayer is built from short lines and short sentences, a form that mimics a person struggling to get words out under pressure. Frequent caesura interrupts the flow, forcing the reader to pause exactly where the speaker himself seems to pause for breath. The poem also shifts tense as it moves between the present moment of writing and the past moment of his mother’s death, showing a speaker still trying to catch up with something that happened long ago.
The exam never asks you to compare two anthology poems directly — the comparison task always pairs your named poem with an unseen poem printed on the paper. But knowing how Prayer connects to other poems in the cluster helps you choose a strong poem for the second part of the question, where you explore one other anthology poem from memory.
Prayer sits well alongside Baby Song, which offers a very different view of birth — Gunn’s baby is angry and reluctant to be born, while Kunial’s speaker treats his own birth as something sacred, folded into his mother’s death. It also connects to Holy Thursday, where Blake explores ritual and religion from a far more public angle than Kunial’s intensely private prayer.
For poems about loss, compare Prayer with Cold Knap Lake, where Clarke circles round a memory she cannot be sure is true, and with Equilibrium, where Lola links a brother’s birth to her grandfather’s decline into forgetting — both poems, like Kunial’s, use one generation’s arrival to measure another’s departure. Tea With Our Grandmothers offers a further contrast: Shire commemorates two grandmothers through language and food rather than through a single, sudden moment of crisis.
Preparing for the Exam
If Prayer is the poem printed on your paper, focus on its two big ideas — prayer as breath and submission, and birth measured against death — and be ready to compare these with whatever unseen poem you are given. If you choose Prayer for the second part of the question, make sure you can quote ‘God’s breath in man returning to his birth’, ‘heaven and earth’ and ‘hurled language’s hurt’ accurately from memory, since the poem itself will not be in front of you.