“Did you permit yourselves / to open once, who would never / open again?” There’s a measuring, perhaps, of the brevity of a single blossom’s season against the length and complexity opportunity allotted the human animal. Last and profoundest of the poppy’s questions is one which seems, superficially, to be related to time. The red poppy has become the sun’s physical counterpart – in theological terms, it is created in God’s image. The poppy mirrors the sun and presents this “lord” with his reflected image. This is an emotional openness, established in the heart: “showing him / the fire of my own heart, fire / like his presence” but it’s more than that. The poppy’s metaphysical experience of being completely open to the sun, its “lord”, is central. But those emotions are not straightforward. When it declares “Oh I have those they / govern me” we’re not inclined to disagree. The poppy’s whole style of speech is indicative of emotions. It begins with a startling assertion – startling partly because of its informal idiom and the suggestion that it belongs to a conversation already begun: “The great thing / is not having / a mind.” Although the human(s) in the conversation make no audible response, the poppy goes on to talk about “feelings” as if an interlocutor had made the suggestion: “OK, you’re against having a mind but what about having emotions?” The poppy, like some of the other flowers she describes, issues a challenge to the fallen humans who somehow continue to inhabit the space from which they are excluded. In a review of The Wild Iris by Stephanie Burt, there is a striking sentence: “People, for Glück, are not the animals that reason, but the plants that cannot know what flowers to bear.” In The Red Poppy, the relation of plant and human is emphasised, especially by the question at the core of the poem: “Oh my brothers and sisters, / were you like me once, long ago, / before you were human?” The series of questions of which this is part assumes evolutionary connections: humans and plants are siblings, sharing a common ancestor. White poppies are distributed by the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) You may find these poppies are also available at your local Quaker Meeting.This week’s poem first appeared in Louise Glück’s 1992 volume, The Wild Iris, one of the 12 collections included in a resplendent edition, Poems 1962-2020, newly published as a Penguin Classic. In the Courtyard Cafe here at Quaker Tapestry Museum in Kendal. Working for peace is the natural consequence of remembering the victims of war. In response, white poppies were developed in 1933 by the Co-operative Women’s Guild to affirm the message of “no more war”. They embody values that reject killing fellow human beings for whatever reason.Ī message originally associated with Remembrance Day, after the First World War, was “never again”. White poppies symbolise the conviction that there are better ways to resolve conflict than through the use of violence. In wearing them, we remember all those killed in war, all those wounded in body or mind, the millions who have been made sick or homeless by war and the families and communities torn apart. Today, over 90% of people killed in warfare are civilians. It includes both civilians and members of armed forces. This includes people of all nationalities. White poppies recall all victims of all wars, including victims of wars that are still being fought. a challenge to attempts to glamourise or celebrate war.they represent remembrance for all victims of war.There are three elements to their meaning: They can be worn on their own or alongside a red poppy. Having been worn in this way for over eighty years. White poppies are worn in the run-up to Remembrance Day every year by thousands of people in the UK and beyond.
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