"Hanging Fire" Poem Explication Essay

Puberty is a confusing and awkward transitional phase that everyone must encounter. As a teenager, one begins to try and understand many aspects of their lives such as race, sexuality, and one’s general place in life. “Hanging Fire” is actually an idiom which means ‘waiting to do something.’ The author is waiting to grow up; waiting to see what she is meant to do in life. What teenager wouldn’t want to get out of the awkward stage of adolescence? The main character, and narrator, in this poem is a fourteen-year-old African American girl who is noticing all of the things that puberty is bringing about in her life. We know that the narrator is African American through various comments throughout the poem such as “my skin has betrayed me” and “how come my knees are always so ashy.” Introducing ethnicity into poetry is common with Audre Lorde’s works. This is a good poem to use when studying the coming of age.

The first stanza is an introduction to the author’s struggles with adolescence. When she states “the boy I cannot live without still sucks his thumb in secret” helps portray to the reader just how childish the narrator’s thoughts and desires are at this point in her life. At fourteen, we all know one is too young to know what love is, much less fall into it. This boy’s childish form of love is not what the narrator is looking for in life but it is all that can be offered at this age.

The second stanza really focuses on the discontent that teenagers and pre-teens feel about every aspect of life. The narrator is worried about her dancing abilities, her room size, and the stress level of all the things she has to deal with now that she is growing up. Her mother is still not taking any part in her life.

The final stanza refers to the problem that every teen faces in which they feel as though they are never listened to and they are just outcasts in a world where social status trumps every other aspect of life. The author feels betrayed by everything she...