Fire only smells like my father
No matter how I feed the flames.
Leaves and twigs and cardboard sheets
All come out the same.
I fan and build the furnace
But as I breath it in
Fire only smells like Father
And it belongs to him.
Poetry
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Hi, Maddstarks29!
This poem is interesting to me. The link between the speaker’s father and fire suggests volumes about their relationship. Fire is a strange element because it’s capable of protecting and providing as much as it is capable of destruction. I struggle to land on how the speaker ultimately feels about their father. Perhaps the father isn’t impressed with the speaker’s attempts to inspire him or make him feel something? Or maybe he’s always equally impressed? I’m curious to know your thoughts, if you have any you’d like to share.
Hello! Ultimately I always stand by my separation of the author and the narrator, since they are both different. I can, however, tell you what I was thinking when I wrote it. I was remembering how my father always smelled like fire when he came home from camping trips, and how I consequently always associate the smell of fire with him. In order to write a poem that I felt mirrored our relationship, I took that idea of the fire, and created a metaphor. In this case, the speaker cannot escape the fire that is both destructive and life- giving, and cannot escape the fact that, although it is a part of her, it was ‘sparked’, for lack of a better term, by her father, forever linking her to him. Let me know if you have any more questions! I love discussing.