Tea With Our Grandmothers — Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire’s Tea With Our Grandmothers is addressed to a friend, and it commemorates both of their grandmothers together — one from Somalia, one from Wales. The poem moves between three languages, Arabic, Swahili and Welsh, to hold two very different lives side by side, showing how migration, memory and love connect the young to the old across continents.
The Poet: Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire writes about the experiences of her people, especially women, and has said her aim is to use poetry to explore memory, voice and heal trauma. She has performed her work across the world and it has been translated into many languages. Her poetry featured in Beyoncé’s visual albums Lemonade (2016) and Black Is King (2020), bringing her writing to an audience far beyond the page.
The poem is addressed to Shire’s friend Basil and commemorates both their grandmothers, one from Somalia and one from Wales. Shire moves between Arabic, Swahili and Welsh words to describe the two women, alluding to the food and cultures that shaped each of their lives.
What Happens in the Poem
The poem names its two grandmothers. The Somali grandmother, Al-Sura, is remembered through the marks of a long life — the lines on her cheek are described as a “tally of surviving,” turning her skin into a record of everything she has lived through. The Welsh grandmother, Doris, is given an equally exotic and mythic identity, so neither woman’s story is treated as more ordinary or more remarkable than the other’s.
Shire also invokes Noura, linking her nurturing role to the grandmothers’ own care for their families, so the poem widens outward from two specific women to a broader idea of female care passed down between generations. The words for grandmother, habooba (Sudanese Arabic) and ayeeyo (Somali), sit inside the English of the poem rather than being translated away, keeping the reader close to the culture the poet is describing.
Using three languages in one poem is a deliberate structural choice, not decoration. Diaspora identity means living inside more than one language and culture at once, and Shire builds this directly into her poem’s vocabulary. The grandmother’s flesh is compared to tamarind, and she is pictured grinding cardamom, so taste and smell become ways of remembering a homeland thousands of miles from where the poem is being written. Al-Sura’s tea is poured using a simile that makes the everyday domestic act feel ceremonial, tying the ritual of tea-drinking to the whole culture the grandmothers carry with them.
Form and Structure
The poem is structured around the parallel stories of the two grandmothers, moving between them so that neither life is treated as more important than the other. Shire uses enjambment to capture the moment of one grandmother’s death, letting the sentence spill past the line break so the moment cannot be neatly contained or paused over.
By structuring the poem around two grandmothers from opposite ends of the world, Shire suggests that survival, ageing and being remembered by the young are universal experiences, not limited to one culture or nationality.
Key Imagery: Food, Language and Survival
Food imagery — tamarind, cardamom, the pouring of tea — links the grandmothers to specific places and senses rather than abstract memory. This matters because the poem’s title itself frames the whole poem as a shared ritual: sitting down, listening, and holding onto two women’s stories before they are lost. The final lines return to this idea of tea as gathering, linking the poem’s structure back to its title and its purpose as an act of elegy and tribute.
Holy Thursday — both poems give the old a guardian or mythic role over the young, though Blake’s beadles are institutional figures and Shire’s grandmothers are personal and loved.
Baby Song — compare how each poem treats a family bond across generations: Gunn’s newborn resists the world it has entered, while Shire’s poem celebrates two grandmothers who have already survived theirs.
Prayer — both poems commemorate an older relative using more than one language and cultural tradition, blending English with words from another heritage.
Equilibrium — both poems work partly as elegies for an older generation, using structure and imagery to hold loss alongside celebration of a life lived.
Theme for English B — compare how each poem explores a migrated, diverse identity, and how language choices — Somali and Welsh words here, American speech patterns there — express who the speaker is.
Using This Poem in the Exam
Because this poem is not printed in full in the specification, you cannot rely on quoting long passages from memory. Instead, learn its shape — two grandmothers, three languages, a structure that moves between their stories, and the single memorable phrase “tally of surviving” — so you can write about it with confidence if you choose it for the second part of the poetry question, where you explore one anthology poem of your own choice in detail. In the first part, where an unfamiliar poem is printed alongside a named anthology poem, the same skills transfer directly: reading for ideas and attitudes, tone and atmosphere, and the effects of language and structure, whichever poem appears on the page.