With rembrance of the dead
Come the poppies:
An orange-red profusion,
Beautiful (in someone else's field).
"Noxious Weeds!" the tourists read,
And we tell how we years ago
Fought them by plucking them up
And dousing them in barrels of water
Drawn by horses.

How they came here
Has passed into legend:
One story credits an English pioneer
Who carried them tenderly to plant
In her new found home--
A dugout by the creek,
A blanket for the door,
The table turned sideways
To keep the cattle out--
But cultivated with flowers
From her own dear mother's garden;
And like her posterity now,
Scattered abroad beyond all recognition.

But to me they sing of Limburg:
Rolling hills, patchwork fields,
Copses of scrubby oak,
Bright yellow brem covered heath,
The valley of the Maas,
Endless caverns, Roman ruins,
The land of Charlemagne,
My land of selfless-service,
And the land of my father's war:
His fields like nearby Flanders
Filled with endless rows of crosses,
Symbols of the ultimate debt of patriotism,
Paid too for me.

I remember how we stood on that quiet hill
Gazing across the placid valley of the Rur,
And you told how the blood flowed,
And of the shock of the artillery,
And how the shrapnel flew,
And how you were cut off there
On that hill beyond the river;
And I became once more that little boy
Who imagined and worried
Through his mother's eyes
For a cold and lonely father
Who protected us all from the Germans.
(Not knowing then that
Mother's mother was as a German--
Unmindful of that enemy within.)

And what a strange and dreadful irony it is,
That with all their stark, bright contrast
In our fruitful fields of home,
My brother does not see them--
Poppy red and barley green reflect the same
In his inherited German eye.

05/30/2000

Author's Note: Impressions on Beaver Dam, Northern Utah, poppies

Posted on 06/03/2009
Copyright © 2024 Leonard M Hawkes