is ripe for reimagining —
christened by the botanist who claimed
its discovery in Brazil, judiciously honored
his ship’s commander with the eponym.
He should have called it jeannebaret,
for the secretly self-taught scientist
whose trained eye found it first, a woman,
disguised as a manservant, the only way
she could sneak on board. By virtue
of that journey, the first female known
to sail around the world at least deserved
a flowering bush in her name.
Yet she, too, in service of invaders
whose words have shaped my senses –
explorer, discovery, heralding European flags
plunged like daggers into shuddering earth.
I lean deeply into bougainvillea’s petals –
they answer to Pataguinha, Roseiro,
Santa Rita, flor de papel, Primavera, Sempre
lustrosa, and long before the Spaniards or Portuguese,
yvoty pytak and juvu. The more it suffers,
the more it flowers, is said of its purple gaze,
steadied through flood, drought, volcanic ash,
as they whispered in their own language
of wind and seed, birth and bud, their bounty
bound with human stories around their tangled roots.
Previously published by The Banyan Review.
