Poppies

Poppies by Jane Weir is spoken by a mother whose son leaves home to go to war. She remembers the moment she said goodbye, and later visits a war memorial, hoping to hear his voice. We are never told whether he has died.

Weir wrote it in 2009, when soldiers were being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It looks at war from the point of view of those left at home.

The poem is in free verse, with four stanzas of different lengths. It opens with a time, ‘Three days before Armistice Sunday’, linking a private goodbye to the public remembrance of the war dead.

Long sentences run across lines through enjambment, like a mother's thoughts spilling out. Caesuras break them up, like a voice catching with emotion.

The poem moves from the house, to the front door, to the war memorial: the mother follows her son's path out into the world.

Weir uses domestic imagery of everyday home life and sewing. The mother pins a poppy on her son: ‘spasms of paper red’ suggests blood and pain beneath the simple act.

Her grief is described through textiles. She cannot speak: ‘All my words / flattened, rolled, turned into felt’. Her nerves are like sewing: ‘my stomach busy / making tucks, darts, pleats’.

When he leaves, she ‘released a song bird from its cage’, an image of his freedom and her loss. At the end she hopes to hear ‘your playground voice catching on the wind’: she still sees him as a child.

Themes: the effects of conflict on families; loss and grief; memory. The poppy, a symbol of remembrance, links one mother's loss with all the war dead.

Compares well with:

• Kamikaze: war seen through a family, and a parent and child.
• Remains: the lasting effects of war, but on a soldier.
• War Photographer: grief, and people at home who are far from the fighting.