THE POPPIES

It’s middle May and they

are on time, along the railway line

and in the fields, earth’s skin

letting out its drops of blood,

waving and wavering,

a light, grateful swarming load.

Their petals, blood-lit, flimsy souls,

seem to have alighted by chance,

a god scattering the crimson dots

of his countenance in advance.

They are drunk with the veins of the sun,

fingered by any infinitesimal breath,

clustering in the heat of the railroad tracks,

crowding the shiny sides of the iron lines,

they chatter and applaud, just slightly torn

when our wheels flash and swarm.

They do not last much but, unlike blood,

they do not dry and fade like memory’s trade

but they shuffle off, are shaken away

by the windy breath of one more day.

 

And these words, so easily reddening

can’t but imitate their enthusiasm

conscious to be, like anything,

just bubbles of a wave in a chasm.