poppy

Remembrance Day Poppy

by

Remembrance Day matters. I didn’t make something new this year. I’ve done about all I can come up with for poppies in the North American style and the English style. Maybe next year I will come up with a fresh idea, or spend time colouring the poppy wreath.

Remembrance Day Poppy ASCII Text Art

by

I’ve made a few poppies for Remembrance Day. This year I want to make something different. I haven’t decided what it will be yet. But, it is the 100th year since the end of WWI. That’s something to work with.

Wearing the Remembrance Day Poppy with Purpose

It’s called Remembrance Day in Canada and takes place each November 11th. The eleventh day and the eleventh hour. We observe a moment of silence. Sometimes they specify a minute of silence, sometimes it’s a moment.
What do you think about while you give the moments of silence? Have your thoughts changed over the years? In school I didn’t know much about the whole thing. We had the facts but not the life experience to really know what it all meant. Later in life I began to understand loss, loss of life and loss of family and loss of fellow humans.
When I see the veteran’s on TV the loss of human life takes on a face. The survivors of each war have more to remember, the actual faces. But, in each of their faces you can see other faces, if you look.
Now the moment of silence has become fresh again. The war isn’t just something written about in history books and talked about by parents and other old people. It’s not so mysterious and unreal to people any more.
Yet we still have a distance from it all, less than the distance our Grandparents felt I think. The war is something happening overseas, even after 9/11 in New York City, the war is not something which directly touches us all. We watch it in the news. Sometimes we have a conversation about it and protest about it or support it, depending on our point of view.
What do you think about when you buy a poppy? Do you know what the donation for the poppy goes towards? It’s a good time to find out.

Remembrance Day Links

The Ode of Remembrance

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Lest we forget.