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| [Arctomecon Merriami] |
I wore a white poppy
and someone asked me why.
As if I was a coward, I suppose,
or someone who didn’t care about those
who made their sacrifice in the mud of conflict.
For honour, I said, for our dead:
all our sons and daughters,
all the dead mothers and fathers
and for ruin, for the sake of ruination.
If the red poppy, now so favoured,
is a symbol of blood shed, why not the white?
One, surely, is for the blood spilling, soaking
into the brown ground like bright despair,
the other, for flesh, bleached and sallow,
like soulless parchment or dried-out petals
left for the wind to blow.
They say the red poppy grew
out of the harrowed fields of battle
more than a weed of disturbed ground,
a memory of what was given.
And I say the white poppy, in Death Valley,
makes the desert bloom, its survival
and persistence in the burning heat
signifies a different kind of hope.
I did not serve, as some remind me,
but I know the stories of the fallen; I knew
the walking wounded who came home to live
in the silence of their own shattered pieces.
The knives are out again and the guns are whispering;
now the old honour of remembrance invokes the dead
as if more must follow.
I do not want to see the same young blood spill again
for the arrogant mistakes of bleak old men
nor let loose the leeches of the great and the good
to settle petulant arguments between kings.
Red blood is a living thing, though dying,
it seeps away, leaving whitened corpses in the dirt
where colours no longer matter.
For those still here colour and the honour in it
is a matter for each of us alone; red or white,
two sides of the same worthless coin.
© BH, 2017
One more for the fallen.
Every year I say, this can’t go on - but every year the same entrenchments reveal themselves. And here, the first line, is borrowed from a friend, JF, who was asked that same question. The answer I’ve written is mine. His was to ask the questioner if he had ever seen military service. JF served in Cyprus in the 60s during the armed struggle there. Nine soldiers were killed while civilian casualties ran into the hundreds. Simple arithmetic, he said, was why he wore a white poppy.
For me, I’m remembering how the parents of my generation were changed by WW2, how they kept their silence up till they died. They had been poorly served by those that sent them to fight (as were the lions led by donkeys) in WW1. And now, it’s become far too easy to dress up sacrifice in couthy cliches, doing little to really understand the costs and even less to prevent it ever happening again.
I’ve said it before – the old men failed them. They still do by tacitly condoning the same weary solutions at the expense of too many lives. This is how the red poppy, innocent coloniser of devastated land, has been politicised as a symbol for war and no more simply a token of remembrance.
We should all remember in our own ways. Respect has many faces and those to whom it is due number more than the battalions who fought and fell. So, because I’m old now, myself, I’ll not willingly condemn anyone; – for doing what they believe is their duty, or for how they want to remember others who do so. But I will continue to speak of this and wear the white poppy.
As I write this, Michael Marra is singing ‘Happed in Mist’ , a song based on Ewan Tavendale’s first war service in Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Sunset Song’. [More about that from Lesley Riddoch - here - http://www.lesleyriddoch.co.uk/2014/11/happed-in-mist.html]
The illustration contains images of the destruction of Ypres (after two years of war) and Louvain (with the last survivor amid the rubble).
Says it all really…
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