“Fruition” is a poem about seeking fulfillment while acknowledging the constraints that govern our lives. As with much of my work, this piece uses the mundane as a point of entry into the philosophical.
The speaker references Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar,” in which Emerson criticizes the human need to name and order the word, expounding a return to a more natural state in which the world is experienced without a need to control it. The speaker then juxtaposes this view against Goethe’s philosophies, whose book Faustus questions the sustainability, not to mention ethics, of our desire to experience more and more, and more.
Solace is found in the historical figure of Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system of naming—who categorized the world while living “a categorically unstortable life.”
MP41080 x 1080 px
Originally published in The Acentos Review.
Ana Maria Caballero (b. 1981) is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits our societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticised motherhood and questioning notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue. The speakers in her poems find their voice by navigating the intellectual and the every day, daring to name what’s left unsaid in that all-important space of the home. Her poems are moments of private rebellion made public.