We walk to the ward from the badly parked car
with your grandma taking four short steps to our two.
We have brought her here to die and we know it.
You check her towel. soap and family trinkets,
pare her nails, parcel her in the rough blankets
and she sinks down into her incontinence.
It is time John. In their pasty bloodless smiles,
in their slack breasts, their stunned brains and their baldness
and in us John: we are almost these monsters.
You're shattered. You give me the keys and I drive
through the twilight zone, past the famous station
to your house, to numb ourselves with alcohol.
Inside, we feel the terror of the dusk begin.
Outside we watch the evening, failing again,
and we let it happen. We can say nothing.
Sometimes the sun spangles and we feel alive.
One thing we have to get, John, out of this life.
The speaker in this poem is perhaps one of two people who have taken the other's grandmother into a care home - perhaps the pair are partners or man and wife, as they go back to the same house for a recovering drink (but they could be, for example, mother and son). Alternatively, the speaker may be Simon Armitage speaking in his own person, while John is a friend or relation, to whose house both go, to drink in silence after taking the old woman to the home. This is the reading of Jan Truswell, a teacher from Yorkshire, who comments:
"Doesn't it make more sense if he's simply helping a friend take his Gran to the old people's home? ...I think a pair of blokes are more likely to drown their inarticulateness in booze. The journey to John's house doesn't seem like a journey to a shared home, too."
The speaker in the poem addresses the other person as "John". John's own feelings are not directly shown, but the speaker's reassurance of him (using his name three times in a few lines) suggests that John is uneasy about what he is doing, whereas the speaker thinks "it is time" to do it.
- What do you think is the relationship depicted here? Can you give reasons for your view?
The poem has a rather brutal honesty - from the start we read that "we have brought her here to die, and we know it". There is a contrast between
- the apparent concern shown in checking that the grandmother has her washing things and "trinkets", paring her nails and tucking her up in bed, and,
- on the other hand, leaving her to sink into "her incontinence".
As the couple leave, the old woman's grandson ("John") is "shattered" - presumably not by any great physical effort but by the strain of getting rid of his "grandma". The poem closes with a comfortless scene of the speaker and John drinking themselves "numb", terrified of "the dusk" (their own mortality) and unable even to speak.
Watch the video below to help you remember the key poetic terms and the forms and structure of poetry to help you achieve the top grades.
