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 breathe 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.
It whispers in its own language
of wind and seed, birth and bud, its bounty
bound with human stories tangled around its roots.
This poem first appeared in Banyan Review (2023).
—
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press, 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Banyan Review, Feral, Vox Populi and numerous other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visit her at www.joannedurham.com.
