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Poppies · Backward Mutters Poetry Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You are listening to the Backward Mutters Poetry Podcast.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Please visit online at backwardmutters.substack.com.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: There you can subscribe via your favorite podcast player and read the newsletter.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Randy Edwards.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Today is Veterans Day.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I remember relatives who continued to refer to the day as Armistice Day as they had
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: since they were a child.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: They probably did so because of either habit or because they actually had lived
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: with World War I veterans.
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  SPEAKER_00: I have no opinion on the change other than to say that it arouses curiosity in me
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: about how things change and what is lost in change.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: The poem I'll read today is one that has changed quite a bit.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Its first form was inspired by a November Poem a Day prompt and the prompt was
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: to write a color poem.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: That prompt fell on Veterans Day,
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  SPEAKER_00: and so I thought I'd attempt a poem in the tradition of those poets who wrote
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: during and following the Great War.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Several years later, the November Poem-A-Day prompt on Veterans Day was to write a sestina.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: A sestina is a poem which uses a complex pattern of six repeated end words followed
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: by a three-line envoy, which includes all of those words again, and yes,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: in a prescribed pattern.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: As for the notepad challenge and what sequence of decisions inspired someone to pick
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: a sestina, I don't know.
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  SPEAKER_00: At any rate, I attempted to rework my color poem into a sestina, which I did after a fashion.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Problem was that the three-light envoy was off.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on the one hand, poets got a poet.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Aren't poets licensed to break the constraints of form?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And though I still like that second iteration of the poem
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: and its non-conformist envoy,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've reworked the envoy to conform to what I think is an agreed-upon pattern.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: This poem, though, in all its iterations,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: continues to be dedicated to our veterans and written in remembrance of all our sons
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: and daughters who are serving, have served, and gone over there.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The poem is retitled, Poppy's.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Red for poppies which in fields bloom, midst the death and blood of bodies strewn.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Brown for the dirt, the trenches which flood and fill with muck and mud and blood.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Black descends on me in death, light fades, night falls with fleeting breath.
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  SPEAKER_00: The earth exhales a gasping breath as red from wounds like flowers bloom in Flanders
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  SPEAKER_00: where life bleeds to death.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Men as seeds broadcast and strewn who dying call for mum and blood,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: a swelling cry as tide to flood.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: The autumn rain fills fields to flood the trenches with muck,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: choke the breath of living land now browned with blood, once waved with wheat,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: flowered in bloom, now torn and ripped with metal strewn,
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  SPEAKER_00: a splintered world of rusting death.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Assigned, resigned to our own death, O'er the top pour a fodder and flood,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Cross no man's land with craters strewn, Shells scream,
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: feet pound with desperate breath, A hope forlorn in national bloom,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Necessity's gift, life and blood.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: This band of brothers bound in blood, blacked by powder, smeared with death,
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: shelter neath shells which burst and bloom, the crack and fire, the roaring flood,
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: explosions, smell, sulfuric breath, hope littered,
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  SPEAKER_00: wasted, cast off, strewn.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: In whitened rows no longer strewn,
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  SPEAKER_00: Poppies sprinkle the field as blood Which waves and swells,
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  SPEAKER_00: Blown by breath in ypres' now green valley of death.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: No brown-clad men gather in flood To Flanders' fields where tombstones bloom.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: One day these strewn, their loves lost to death, shall blush with blood.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Life lift and flood, stand tall, breathe with living breath, and bloom.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: listening to the Backward Mutters Poetry Podcast.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Randy Edwards.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 4:59
  [music]