Citrus Fruits as a Metaphor for Love in Poetry
I peel oranges neatly.
The sections come apart cleanly, perfectly in my hands.
When Emily peels an orange, she tears holes in it. Juice squirts in all directions.
“Kate,” she says, “I don’t know how you do it!”
Emily is my best friend.
I hope she never learns how to peel oranges.
Oranges by Jean Little
Food has been used as a metaphor for love for years now, and it’s quite fitting. Even the simple question, “Have you eaten yet?” is inherently filled with love, and it’s definitely not explicitly romantic. It’s about worrying about another person and making sure they’re getting what they need. Wanting to make something from scratch, keeping them alive and satisfied.Sharing a meal with the people we love is a simple but meaningful gesture. It’s vulnerable. “Eat, because I love you,” are words we cannot say but can only feel. And the acceptance of that gesture is entirely surreal.
The metaphor is present in various forms of poetry. Monologues to one-liners. Artist to artist. Lover to lover–perhaps “lover” is synonymous with “person.” There is no determining exactly what love is or what love means.
Something I have noticed about these poems is that they are mostly citrus-themed. There is a quality to citrus that is communal and mundane– something you can share with friends, something you can bring to gatherings. Baked into goodies, into candles. Perhaps it is because citrus is sensory– the smell, the taste– and it is raw and unfiltered.
Citrus fruits are especially used as a metaphor for love because of the strong waves of flavours– sweet and sour and unbearably bitter– symbolising pure, unbridled emotions like love, loss, and grief, which are intrinsically linked, as all things are.
When you bite into a fruit, you feel the juice on your tongue, on your teeth, it seeps and you lick, from sour to sweeter, plump and fleshy, to the seed. Tasting every part of it, knowing you will never be able to relive that moment.
Here is an excerpt from the poem The Side Effect of Eating Too Many Clementines by Alessia di Cesare.
There are boxes of clementines in the kitchen and the thing is that I love you again. The thing is that I love what orange tastes like so I eat too much of it and end up sick. [...] Instead I will mock the break with more breaking and eat all the clementines again. I only say “again” because I don’t know how to say I never stopped.
A few lines from The Side Effect of Eating Too Many Clementines by Alessia di Cesare
An example I am particularly fond of, but is not directly about citrus fruits, is From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee. Here is an excerpt from the poem.
[...] O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Excerpt from From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
“To eat not only the skin, but the shade,” meaning to eat everything, to experience all the joys and sorrows of life, yet to live in the joys as though the sorrows could never touch your eternity. To take the joys by eating them whole, keeping them within you like golden lights.
Joys, like peaches, that come from everywhere, are passed on and are felt by other people. We are all intrinsically linked, raw and loving.
It is about the willingness to grab a fruit and bite into it, to split an orange messily, juice dripping down your fingers, look fondly on second after mundane second that passes, and allowing yourself to truly feel in that moment.
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