"Though Poppies Blow"

by Martha E. Davis, age 17, "St. Nicholas" magazine, September 1930

Some gold drooped down from the gleaming sun
     And formed into poppies, fragile and deep.
They symboled a state that had just begun
     To wake from an opiumed sleep.

They ran down hillsides, brown and bare;
     They danced to a diamonded sea

And the poppies laughed in the azured air,
     For their souls were gay and free.

Some blood dripped out of a weary life
     Into a foreign field,
And the red from the product of Hell's own strife
     The gaps in the crosses sealed.

And the poppies of fire are thick and red
     As the bombs that burst in a sky.
They grow from the hearts of a fighting dead
     That fought for the right to die.

The poppies are gold in this sunny clime;
     In Flanders they're sparks from a flame;
But the seeds are alike as the years of time
     For the source remains the same.