The Bougainvillea Will Be Forgiven
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Bougainvillea Will Be Forgiven
On the road to Saida, you write, bougainvillea frames the ruin:
bridges torn . . . the coastal highwayentirely deserted . . . carcasses of cars,
some buried under blocks of concrete… Everything has changed except
the glorious bloom of the bougainvillea. I want to tell you about the land here
in New Orleans, where sunflowers sprout in muck among the slabs,
where mold paints elaborate tapestries on ungutted walls.
Other flowering trees have wilted, or shied, you say, but the stubborn colors of these
blooms: purplish red, boastful fuchsia, glaring white, flaunt themselves against the broken land.
When my friend returned to his house in Mid-City, the same bold, pink shrub was all that was left
of what he knew. You tell me your TV station airs cries for help from citizens trapped
in homes in the south, and I flash to watching my city between commercial breaks, the sign
HELP US PLEAS, white cloth flapping, white teeth of news announcers [End Page 1213]
parsing out facts between platitudes. You obsess about bodies still trapped
in rubble. I obsess about bodies still turning up like potatoes when flood
ground shifts. A year since the hurricane, tufts of green poke up from mud’s hieroglyphs
as if to erase them. What will flourish, what remain for us? When your skies are still and our season
passes, will ducks nest in levee breaks, will bombs seed the field? [End Page 1214]
Andy Young is co-editor of Meena Magazine, a bilingual Arabic-English literary journal, and author of two chapbooks of poems, mime and All Fires the Fire. Her work has also appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Cincinnati Review, Nawafez (Lebanon), The Stinging Fly (Ireland), We Begin Here, and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. She teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
