Coming home by Owen Sheers

The Poem: 

My mother’s hug is awkward,
As if the space between her open arms
is reserved for a child, not this body of a man.
In the kitchen she kneads the dough,
flipping it and patting before laying in again.
The flour makes her over, dusting
The hairs on her cheek, smoothing out wrinkles.

Dad still goes and soaks himself in the rain.
Up to his elbows in hedge, he works
on a hole that reappears every Winter,
its edges laced with wet wool –
frozen breaths snagged on the blackthorn.
When he comes in again his hair is wild,
and his pockets are filled with filings of hay.

All seated, my grandfather pours the wine.
His unsteady hand makes the neck of the bottle
shiver on the lip of each glass;
it is a tune he plays faster each year.

Summary and Analysis

Sheers’ poem expresses the pain of the speaker on witnessing the inevitable old age of his family on his return to home. Through understanding the speakers’ refusal to come to terms with the cruel effects of old age on his mother, father and grandfather, the poignancy of the situation is intensified for the reader.

The shrinking physical form of the mother is simply interpreted as a neutral trait, as ‘awkwardness’, and as a problem of deliberate design. It is not that old age has forced upon his mother rigidity of limbs and joints that stops her ‘open arms’ from embracing her adult son, but it is simply a natural quirk of his mother’s physical form – it was build to embrace a child, that’s all. The sight of an elderly lady with stiff limbs still kneading dough diligently should be a sad and humbling sight, but instead it is expressed as a scene of youthful make over, as if the scattered flour on the mothers’ face acts like cosmetic products, ‘smoothing out wrinkles’. The tragedy of irrecoverable youth is also drawn out by this last image in the first stanza.

The actions and description of the father is also similarly made poignant through the speakers’ interpretation of the father’s motivation for his actions. Drenched in the rain in his work in maintaining the garden, the speaker chooses instead to interpret his father as voluntarily going out to ‘soak himself in the rain’. The hardship of gardening is also reinforced through the imagery of the father’s frozen breaths as ‘wet wool’. An opaque, white, fluffy material, the comparison of the father’s breath in the air with wool is a testament to the freezing weather that the father is working in, and the romanticizing of such frozen breath as wool ironically draws out the extremely unromantic reality of working on a garden hedge in the rain and cold.

Finally, the grandfather’s arthritis that worsens noticeably every year is understood instead as a musical tune that he plays with more speed, more expertise every year. The irony of such a comparison, that the grandfather does not have choice in the worsening arthritis, and it is far from being a skill that is deliberately cultivated, draws out the cruel of old age, and the speaker’s difficulty in coming to terms with its effects on his family members.