Poppy Day

Years back
In Flander’s fields
I saw them growing still
edging rows of wheat
Along dirt tracks the tourists
And the tractors travel
Toward the heroes’ monument at Waterloo
Red poppies, Papaver rhoeas
French – Coclicot

In Ypres
One hundred years ago
They grew in fields disturbed
By trench and bomb
By muddy feet and shattered corpse
Blood red their petals
In an angry wind
A stubborn resurrection
Against all senseless
Death

Today, across the world
we wear facsimiles
Upon our chests
Walk solemnly to the grave
Of soldiers whose names
We will never know
So many did they die and so fast
In that almost forgotten global war

In America
We speak of veterans
And raise the flag
Ponder war and peace
And armistice
An end to wars

All good
To bow our hearts before the dead
And give all honor to those alive
My mother’s father
He was there
In France, while still a youth
Who somehow joined
America’s Expeditionary Force
And then returned, no poppies
Waving over his grave

Here
On California’s shores
Old European arguments fall short
We look to check our facebook feed
And armistice is a neglected word
We claim our holiday
And proudly stand with America’s might

Yet as I walk in fields
And canyons
Of this west-leading
Continent edge
I see our poppy
Gold-orange not red
catching the wind, coloring the land
What war or peace does it
Proclaim?

It whispers of a
genocide
In every hill
How love of gold
As strong and heedless
As each poppies’ painted petals
Like a battle wind
Came here and pushed
The native people out, enslaved
Or killed them

Glorying, Even to this day
In smiling forgetfulness
Knowing only the industrious heritage
Of crouching miners
Pick-axed adventurers
Nimble entrepreneurs
All of us, grateful inhabitants
Of a place we call
The Gold Country

So better on this
Armistice day
Remember all our wars
Our place within them
Our poppy gold
Not with greed or death
But with renewal
For people long forgotten
Still among us, speak:
We are Nisenan
Nisek humkawi
Wada’ di musek –
This is our homeland
We all survive here

11
XI
20
Sky clear, waning crescent moon
On Ancestral Homelands
Of the Nisenan

*Veterans Day, November 11th, began as Armistice Day, remembering the moment on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when an armistice ended World War I. In part due to the poem ‘In Flanders Fields,’ written by the Canadian soldier John McCrea in 1915 after the 2nd Battle of Ypres, the red field poppy became a symbol of Armistice Day and a way to memorialize the dead and the living who went through that war. For that reason, in the UK, Armistice Day is often informally called ‘Poppy Day.’ The California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica, the official flower and a common symbol of the state, is not closely related to Europe’s red field poppy, though it is in the same family, Papaveraceae. The Nisenan Ancestral Homelands stretch from the ‘Sutter Buttes’ of the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada crest, including the Yuba and Bear River watersheds. It is in this region that some of the most intensive gold mining in the state occurred.