Today is a day to think of the re-birth of life in our gardens even as we remember the flowers that grow in Flanders fields above the brave lads whose blood fertilized so much of the ground there.
Leave your poems and photos of flowers and butterflies in memoriam and for all here so that we may together contemplate the beauty, the fragility, and the transience of Nature and the lives we live among her.
Here are a couple of poems from two men writing about flowers--both men gave their lives on some foreign battlefield created by the folly of others.
How many more poems did these men have to write that we will never be able to read?
Now they are the flowers and the butterflies, and so too will we all shall be.
Butterflies
Siegfried Sassoon
Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;
O living flowers against the heedless blue
Of summer days, what sends them dancing through
This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?
Theirs are the musing silences between
The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make
Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;
And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.
And they are as my soul that wings its way
Out of the starlit dimness into morn:
And they are as my tremulous being—born
To know but this, the phantom glare of day.
And, a photo from my garden:
In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
From my garden, a beautiful poppy.