Vintage Years Copyright © Richard J Whiting 2011

Barley tops blush,
Thinned by drought.
A cruel winter mocked
By wild daisies
More beautiful than snow.
Lines of poppies
Head and shoulders above the corn
Divide the fields,
Challenge the sunset,

Riot in the verges.
I capture them in High Definition;
Losing the smell of the grass,
The chiff-chaff’s call,
The run of a fox.
Weak as paper,
Svelte as silk
Weathered flags
On green-haired poles
Singing their song of brevity
To a listening wind.

Trying to trap time,
I fill a vase,
The best year for poppies
Says the radio
For almost a hundred years.
Not a half-hour picked
Heads hang low,
Slide into the water;
Drowned corpses,
Beyond resurrection.

One I save.
In the pages of a book,
Pressed by poets;
A reminder of those
Who blazed so red,
Died so young
A century past;
The vintage crop,
The downed corpses,
Of Ypres and Passchenndaele.