Risa Bear’s “The First Few Fires” opens by confessing that the fire in the stove is premature: a hummingbird still works the blooms, and only a brief dawn chill justifies the flame. That small admission sets the poem’s tone. The first fires are not a heroic stand against winter; they are a modest ritual, a way of acknowledging change before it fully arrives. By the final line, the poem has quietly linked that ritual to the largest change of all—the ground that will one day hold our graves.
The poem is built in four quatrains, but the lines move like speech rather than set song. There is no regular rhyme, though the close gathers assonance in “hens,” “knees,” and “graves,” making the ending feel both plain and final. The speaker’s voice is conversational and self-correcting: “Here in this stove aren't much; I acknowledge.” Enjambment often makes the thought pause or swerve, as when “so I / Feeling only a brief dawn chill, build accordingly” lets the speaker seem to look out at the morning, test the air, and then decide. Later, a stanza break after “ready” delays the day’s next action: “ready / In sweater and chore coat to see to hens.” The sentence has to step over the line ending, just as the day steps from fire-warmth into work.
The imagery moves between the wild and the domestic, often fusing them. The speaker ranges through “thickets of summer” with a “long-handled pruner,” doing practical work: “Stealing from oak and ash, letting in a little light.” That phrase is quietly double—taking firewood also opens the canopy, letting light reach what remains. The wood is piled in the “long room where that stove squats,” and the verb gives the stove the patient presence of a creature. When the fire catches, attention lingers on “the least hints of gold and vermillion” in paper and twigs. “Vermillion” is almost painterly, but it sits naturally beside the plain speech of stacking twigs. The reward is deliberately small: “warm enough for one dark cup of tea.” No more is claimed. Then the day warms, and the body remembers summer: sweaters and chore coats are shucked, sweat beads on “ears and eyelids,” and the speaker feels “summer reborn briefly in our knees.” The memory of heat is physical rather than sentimental.
The shift from “I” to “we” after the fire is lit matters. Preparation is solitary; the warmth becomes shared. “We sit back,” and later “our knees” and “our graves” widen the poem’s reach. That inclusive turn keeps mortality from feeling like a private melancholy. The final sentence, “So; until the ground grows cold that will hold our graves,” is the poem’s quiet hinge. The semicolon after “So” creates a pause, a small breath before an old truth. What makes the poem significant is its sense of scale. It never pretends that these early fires can hold off death; they “aren't much.” Yet the ritual still matters—to light a few twigs, notice their color, drink a cup of tea, and feed the hens is to be alive inside the interval. The last cold is treated as a fact of weather, not a melodrama, and that is precisely why the line lands with such force.