Dream-laden poppies, flowers of sleep, ah, why
Must ye now bid oblivion to remember?
Long months and months ago
You shed your careless petals in the corn,
Or fell when reeking horses to and fro
Dragged the great reaper till the fields were shorn;
And now, ah, now ye blow,
As in a dying fire a glowing ember,
To make our chilly winter more forlorn.
'Tis not of English autumns that ye tell,
Poppies of Flanders! No, your beauty brings
Memories of other golden heads that fell
In other fields to other harvestings;
When the dark horseman reaped
Sheaves not of corn, fields not with poppies red,
Soil not in your oblivious juices steeped,
When English lives like falling leaves were shed,
And youth and valor heaped
Like shocks of corn upon the harvest wain,
That from his fork the sunburnt reaper flings—
Countless as the innumerable grain.
O dread and terrible harvesting of war!
Harrow and plow and sickle all in one,
Untimely waste that husbandmen abhor,
Green crops uprooted ere they feel the sun,
