Revolution

Platanal, 1974, by Myrna Báez Considering Myrna Báez’s painting Platanal, E. Carmen Ramos explains, “When Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, artists like Francisco Oller depicted the plantain as both a key accoutrement to the jibaro (rural peasant) and a metaphor for the island’s independent cultural identity.” Plantain trees gather at the edge of the orchard, clamor for light in the foreground. They seem to grow as one, as if they’d fill the field and the mountains behind them, leaves large and frayed. We stood there, once, or someplace like it, so here we are again, it seems, years later, branches leaning over the road, you in your long skirt, looking out as if to recall something you meant to do.My country, I hear you say still. But if that’s dusk in the hills, you know what’s coming to the field. You’ll stand among them till there’s nothing left to see. I’ll wait beside you, though I don’t know what we’re waiting for.