Imagine yourself a red ceramic Poppy, <br />placed with care into the English soil. <br />One hundred years ago you were a soldier, <br />a frightened teen in a chaotic world. <br />You'd been sent, by King's command, into the battle- <br />A mindless melee John French thought he'd won. <br />Perhaps some yards of France had been reclaimed <br />at a mind numbing cost of mothers' sons. <br />You were one of those shot, gassed or burned. <br />Hit by a shell and blown to kingdom come. <br />(In ‘fourteen they had funerals for the fallen. <br />Mass burials became the norm before Verdun.) <br />That's how you went from the playing fields of Eton <br />to an unmarked grave somewhere in Northern France. <br />So now you are a red ceramic poppy, <br />a symbol of an Empire, now passed. <br />Placed in English soil by teenaged hands. <br />one of nine hundred thousand home at last.<br /><br />John F. McCullagh<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/red-ceramic-poppy/
