A few days I started to write here about poppies: red ones, white ones and pinky-purple ones.

The red ones symbolic of Armistice, even more in evidence on this centenary year, displayed in our village with its links to the Armed Forces of the UK,  and in our northern sanctuary space of Brora, today honouring its many casualties.

The white ones I saw movingly displayed at the Friends’ Meeting House, Hartington Grove, Cambridge. Marking the loss of non-combatant stretcher bearers, civilians, victims of atrocities in the last millenium and this one…

The lilac petals of opium poppies, self-seeded sporadically in my garden and sown as a crop in Afghanistan, Pakistan, South America. Their own uneasy history of healing and harming, pain relief and pain infliction.

And then my hand slipped and I deleted all my text by mistake, and thought – what can I add anyway to the words, the images, the contemplation and the honouring?

Until this morning, when this link arrived from a friend who attended my writing group sessions last winter.

In her poem she puts into words what I struggle to do.

http://www.mycupofbeauty.co.uk/remembering-the-great

Thank you dear one. May we keep Remembering the Great.