Its not a Flanders poppy, but it is a red poppy with the black centre. It is always starts to flower in the second week of November and there is always a new flower open on Remberance Day. This one greeted me this morning!
Everyone is knitting poppies for the Anzac Day centenary but my memory is always of poppies for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the War to End All Wars officially ceased.
This year I felt sadder than usual so I made a poppy for our joint grandfathers and great uncles, then I thought about our parents generation and the second war and family in occupied Europe. It is a day of great sadness so I made a Rememberance Day bird for all of them and both wars.
This is a bird of contemplation - is he looking backwards or to the future.........
All our family of both generations came back and made great lives for themselves and their families. We always stop to remember the dead but over the years the living and their families have paid a price too.
Same bird settled in a wattle tree. This photo is for Tom. He lived just down the road from us when I was at primary school. One day when I was about eleven he loaned me a book to read. It was his published diary from his days at the front in France and later as a prisoner then as an escapee. I'd never seen a horror movie, or read a horror story - and this was horror but with a sort of happy ending - after all he got home, raised a lovely family and had a good life. But it was a true story, and even harder to comprehend it was written by a lovely gentle old man I actually knew!
Four years later when I read all Quiet on the Western Front I got a terrible shock when I found I'd been barracking for the "wrong"side for most of the book - what a lesson!
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