Fire’s Dance
The heat engulfs you
within a lover’s arms
impossible to resist her tantalizing
touch
The flames rise up and lick
all the oxygen, escalating
your desires with her last gasp of
air
She moves like a dancer
surefooted across the stage
captivating you with her every
step
Watch her seductive dance
You begin to fixate
Caught up in the trance
And slowly suffocate
NaPoWriMo Prompt – And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). A couple of days ago, we played around with hard-boiled similes. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that contains at least one of a different kind of simile – an epic simile. Also known as Homeric similes, these are basically extended similes that develop over multiple lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have mainly been used in epic poems, typically as decorative elements that emphasize the dramatic nature of the subject (see, by way of illustration, this example from Milton’s Paradise Lost). But you could write a complete poem that is just one lengthy, epic simile, relying on the surprising comparison of unlike things to carry the poem across. And if you’re feeling especially cheeky, you could even write a poem in which the epic simile spends lines heroically and dramatically describing something that turns out to be quite prosaic. Whatever you decide to compare, I hope you have fun extending your simile(s) to epic lengths.
Good afternoon and welcome to day twenty-six of napowrimo. I’m not sure how many of my readers are aware, but Arizona is fighting two wildfires right now. The one north of Flagstaff made national news. Last night I enjoyed watching a fire in the backyard contained in our fire pit; and as I posted my late prompt from yesterday, I realized it would be easy to talk about fire in simile. This poem quickly wrote itself. Thank you for reading my take on epic simile.
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