Haibun with Poppies and Ash
I used to see them on my way home from school as I walked the tracks, crowds of orange poppies springing up as if the wind from rushing trains had sown their seeds. I thought of them as uncultivated―my mother’s word―when I saw their spindly stems and gaudy petals. A neighbor lady told me my family all thought they were superior. And she was right. But on Veterans Day, my father would pin a red paper poppy on the lapel of his blue serge suit, the same way, during Easter week, he would come home with a blur of ash on his forehead. I loved him, then, for the common way he wore these signs like a badge. Like a blessing. It was years before I saw a red poppy, solitary and perfect on the side of a headland trail. They call the red ones corn poppies because they grow in disturbed soil. Like after the sowing of corn or the digging of soldiers’ graves in Flanders Fields. I look for poppies on my walks now. I’ve bought a seed packet with a picture of poppies with just a tinge of yellow brightening the tips of their petals. I’m going to plant them in my front yard and wait for spring when they’ll raise up their unassuming heads, letting my neighbors know, at last, I’m becoming one of them.
when I look back now
it’s the ashy-white smolder
that made the fire bright
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four full-length collections: The Zen Piano-Mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, Everything Turns Into Something Else, runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize and, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Read more.
First published in Verse Daily