Red Poppies

Red Poppies

Red poppies grow in all the wild spaces

Fragile tissue petals open around a black-eyed centre

Looking gently at all the cracked spaces.

I walk.

Pavements, crumbled cement and buckled tar
Broken spaces, sore places.

I see that poppies grow in all the wild spaces.

Brilliant red, flowering blood

Abundance showing me new places.

My heart has broken open again,

Cracks and furrows wide and deep

Filled with last season’s seed.

Allow my unfolding, all buckled and bent

No longer airborne, swirling and spent.

My feet firmly grounded,

the season is begun

I see that poppies grow, in all the right places.

Amen and thank you for the poppies.

By Jackeline Plank