Flamboyance

Flamboyance/Flamboyant.  A word to savour. It conjures a world of overemphasis coupled with style and personalities to match. The gestures, glitz and glamour to take us away from the drab '50s when I was nobbut a little lass. We were surrounded by the dull and derelict, even the cars were a uniform black. We needed 'Sunday Night at the London Palladium ', to show us people with huge charisma and extreme dress sense while we had to carry on with drab! 

It was the '60s when we threw off the school uniform, struggled into tiny Lurex outfits, took ages applying individual false eyelashes and blue nail varnish from the theatrical shop and hit the town, innocent compared to now but we got noticed. 

Flamboyance, the noun comes from the French 'flamboyer ' to flame and its root word means to shine, flash and burn. One definition is “marked by ostentation but tasteless”. 

Then there is the tree... 

 

Royal Poinciana

In 1966 my dad and I flew to Bermuda with B.O.A.C. My sister and her husband had taken jobs there to escape winter and left in the February, our mother died in May, so dad cobbled the fare together somehow and we found ourselves dressed to the nines (I was wearing a matching coat and dress), stepping into this luxury with air hostesses not stewards, and eating an edible meal. It would have been wonderful if we hadn’t been overwhelmed with grief. We came down to earth in the small, searingly hot apartment they had rented, days later bizarrely all grouped around one small radio listening to England winning the World Cup. What has this to do with anything?

When I looked up the word it took me to the Poinciana which is a showy tropical tree native to Madagascar, widely planted in tropical regions for its immense scarlet and orange flowers and I remembered it as this amazing mass of colour I had seen in Bermuda. It was introduced there in 1870 or thereabouts and known as the Royal Poinciana, Flame of the Forest or Flamboyant. I will never forget seeing the vibrant colours of the flowers and fauna on Bermuda in contrast to the delicacy of colours on this island and both have their richness. 

The poem is about another vibrant flower, the Tiger Lily. 

The Magnificence of Lilies

 

As Tigers are unfettered 

from cellophane 

fumes rise, 

two of us drugged, lit up 

for change. 

Wild words dissolve 

before these flames, we 

slowly inhale and hear 

colour tell a tale 

of hidden depths and 

long neglect. Faint 

music from new open throats 

begins to swell this room, soon 

our ceiling will burst the lock 

on song that has never been heard. 

C. Kitchen. 

Thanks for reading,

Cynthia