The Fire This Time

Clint Smith’s poem repeats the word “Maybe” at the beginning of fourteen different statements. When he repeats it at the beginnings of thirteen lines, he employs a poetic device known as anaphora. The word maybe represents the poetic speaker’s wrestling questions—or Queries, as the title suggests. However, he phrases them not as questions but as statements with a tone of wonder, confusion, and disillusionment, suggesting the speaker may feel surer than he appears. This highly personal lyric poem is free-verse, arranged with an irregular pattern of stanza types, line lengths, and poetic meter. 

Smith’s speaker begins with considering his origins and how light and dark interact. These themes of light and dark, as well as fullness and emptiness, extend to the term marginalized, which the speaker associates with margin: “the edge / of a sheet of paper, how empty it is […]” (99). A white classmate, saying the word marginalized, indicates that the speaker belongs in this void as a black boy in America. This void extends to the speaker’s imagined white audience, who may banish his work for its discussions of race. His poetry falls into the metaphorical margin when readers assume his work is “a cry for help” (100). 

The speaker’s next query is as defiant as it is doubtful: “Maybe the poem is a cry for help” (100). This bold one-line stanza challenges the speaker’s imagined audience through suggesting that their criticism might be true (although the amount of irony in this statement remains open to interpretation). The following stanza’s references to the death and alienation woven into the black experience suggests that Smith’s speaker may indeed write with some desperation, both for himself and his community. 

Smith considers, “Maybe there’s a place where everyone is both / in love with and running from their own skin. / Maybe that place is here” (100). The here in this line might indicate America, the poem, or the black experience. The specter of death returns in the final stanza’s phrase, “burying darkness” (100), which also echoes the dark space between his father’s teeth from the first stanza. This final stanza considers the interplay between love and death. The speaker feels endangered and compelled to run when confronted with affection, just as others flee “from their own skin” (100). The final two lines of the poem suggest that the strong threat of death compels the speaker to flee the loved ones that would mourn him after his passing.