Helene Johnson’s speaker moves through everyday moments—digging into soil, watching a bird learn to fly, riding a crowded trolley, buying a newspaper—and treats each one as a source of deep, almost spiritual nourishment. The mood is lush, physical, and reverent. Rain becomes playful, a tree becomes a breathing presence, and even the face of a stranger dreaming of a “wrinkled river” holds quiet wonder. There is a subtle awareness of Black identity in details like the penny “the color of my hand,” but the main feeling is broader: a fierce, ecstatic love for being alive. The speaker doesn’t want to hold life at a safe distance. She wants to be pierced by it, wounded the way Christ was, and finally consumed. Fulfillment here means loving experience so completely that even pain and death feel like part of the embrace.
Fulfillment — Summary
To climb a hill that hungers for the sky, To dig my hands wrist deep in pregnant earth, To watch a young bird, veering, learn to fly, To give a still, stark poem shining birth.
To hear the rain drool, dimpling, down the drain And splash with a wet giggle in the street, To ramble in the twilight after supper, And to count the pretty faces that you meet.
To ride to town on trolleys, crowded, teeming With joy and hurry and laughter and push and sweat-- Squeezed next a patent-leathered Negro dreaming Of a wrinkled river and a minnow net.
To buy a paper from a breathless boy, And read of kings and queens in foreign lands, Hyperbole of romance and adventure, All for a penny the color of my hand.
To lean against a strong tree’s bosom, sentient And hushed before the silent prayer it breathes, To melt the still snow with my seething body And kiss the warm earth tremulous underneath.
Ah, life, to let your stabbing beauty pierce me And wound me like we did the studded Christ, To grapple with you, loving you too fiercely, And to die bleeding--consummate with Life.