Trauma Comes Growth In Kelan Nee's 'Sparks In The Sun'

Kendall Anthony
Professor Sponsler
English-106
12 May 2023
Through Trauma Comes Growth A typical day looks different for every person on this planet. Everyone deals with their own personal struggles on a day-to-day basis. Everyone has their own unique emotional scars and trauma they carry with them. The good thing about life's struggles is that it comes with growth and resistance. Kelan Nee is a writer who bears many emotional scars. He writes to express his emotions about his struggles and how he is handling the trauma today. The poem, Sparks in the Sun, uses metaphors and tone to show how through trauma comes growth. The first read of a poem is just a scratch on the surface of the meaning it carries. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish

The woman believes her addiction makes her unlovable and that he will fall out of love, but he is trying to explain they are the same in this situation. Children of parents with drug addictions are more likely to have one and/or a partner with one (Hammers-Crowell 2). In the poem Around the Sun, Nee says that his father passed while drunk and high or because of being drunk and high. With this information we can assume the part, “My dad is gone” (Line 24), means his father is dead. Losing a parent is obviously traumatic but it is heavier to lose a parent to a drug addiction.
Another common metaphor that Kelan Nee uses throughout the poem and his other works is the sun and sparks, which can be generalized to brightness or light. Sparks, light, and brightness all metaphorically or typically mean good. There are sayings like night and day or light and darkness. The brighter things are always good and the darker things are always the bad. The mentions of brightness throughout the poem represent it breaking through the seal. The poet is growing from his trauma and using it as guidance. He mentions his father cleaning up a fish at sundown. Sundown represents the bad memories and

The tone throughout this poem gives off feelings of grief but also hope. The tone, in the beginning, is macabre with the statement, “The ache” (Line 3). This indicates that his father is in pain, emotionally not literally. It makes the reader empathize with those in pain. It also makes the reader think about why the person may be in pain. In this poem, the father is in pain because of his own personal traumas and his addiction to drugs. This part of the father can be heavy on the entire family and cause a domino effect of drug abuse. The poet is a victim of this domino effect but is ‘wiping the blood off’ and growing past the trauma. The reader feels the ‘spark’ at the end of the poem. The glimmer of growth from the trauma and resistance to the