Three days before Armistice Sunday and poppies had already been placed on individual war graves. Before you left, I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals, spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer.
Sellotape bandaged around my hand, I rounded up as many white cat hairs as I could, smoothed down your shirt's upturned collar, steeled the softening of my face. I wanted to graze my nose across the tip of your nose, play at being Eskimos like we did when you were little. I resisted the impulse to run my fingers through the gelled blackthorns of your hair. All my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt,
slowly melting. I was brave, as I walked with you, to the front door, threw it open, the world overflowing like a treasure chest. A split second and you were away, intoxicated. After you'd gone I went into your bedroom, released a song bird from its cage. Later a single dove flew from the pear tree, and this is where it has led me, skirting the church yard walls, my stomach busy making tucks, darts, pleats, hat-less, without a winter coat or reinforcements of scarf, gloves.
On reaching the top of the hill I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial, leaned against it like a wishbone. The dove pulled freely against the sky, an ornamental stitch. I listened, hoping to hear your playground voice catching on the wind.
'Poppies' is one of the poems in Jane Weir's collection, The Way I Dressed During the Revolution, which is available post free from the Templar Poetry website: click here
'Poppies' was one of the poems commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy who invited modern poets to offer a war poem for 'Exit Wounds', published in the Guardian at the beginning of the Iraq Inquiry in July 2009.
'Poppies' is also published in the AQA Digital Literature anthology for GCSE English, in the Conflict cluster, in The Royal British Legion 2010/2011 CD ROM for Schools and Young People Teaching and Learning resource for Key Stages 1-4 and in several GCSE Teaching and Learning texts including York Notes and CGP Revision Guides. There is also a live reading of the poem by Jane Weir on the Teachit website and Poppies is read by Joanna Lumley on the 2010 Royal British Legion CD We Will Remember Them which is raising funds for the 2010 Poppy Appeal Fund.
If you wish to link with the AQA GCSE Digital Anthology and find a copy of this poem and other poetry in the anthology click on this link
'Poppies': Jane Weir Interviewed by Luca Brancati - Primafila Cafe, Vicenza, 2010, Italy