Hythe+ 12 Four Poems by Joseph Minden
Joseph Minden, Poppy HMS Genesis, 2022, AI Generated Image
Union Jack
The red parts
of the field
are the bloody
and forgetful
poppy tongues.
The blue parts
are Picardy’s
forgotten cornflowers.
*
[
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Serre Road Cemetery No. 2
It’s so - cinematic.
So it was.
An enormous array
of bright stones.
A testament, a crowd,
so managed
it was impossible
not to, um,
become sedated. Why
do I feel
as though I am waking
in a dream?
I asked Jason, as we
walked around
aimlessly above the
body parts.
Because they had to try
to re-fuse
what had been dismembered
by the war:
a permanent body
composed of
transitory parts,
he replied.
Did my mum ever tell
you about
uncle Roy? I asked. He
shook his head.
*
Visiting Ypres to imagine cemeteries, Edwin Lutyens wrote home
a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men
were tucked in where they fell.
*
In the book
Where Poppies Blow
by John Lewis-Stempel,
he explains that
in the cemeteries,
where memory was planted,
the French countryside
was sequestered
and remodelled
to become
little bits of Britain.
*
In 1960
the Imperial War Graves Commission
changed its name.
*
I lost myself and found a field
of poppies lanced for gum,
for milky, languid tears: the yield
of soft somniferum,
and standing in the field were two
whom poppies comforted.
It was Maria Logan who
began to speak. She said:
Be mine the balm, whose sov’reign pow’r
Can still the throb of Pain;
The produce of the scentless flow’r,
That strews Hindostan’s plain.
Then Sara Coleridge spoke up,
compelled to talk in turn
about the nullifying cup
that terminates concern.
When poor Mama long restless lies,
She drinks the poppy’s juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes,
And slumber soon produce:
O then my sweet, my happy boy
Will thank the Poppy-flower
Which brings the sleep to dear Mama
At midnight’s darksome hour.
The poppies stretched out, row on row,
as far as I could see
and both the women turned to go
without noticing me.
*
In November 2010, at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Prime Minister David Cameron and a number of other British politicians were asked to remove Remembrance Day poppies from their lapels.
A Chinese official explained that they would cause offence as reminders of the Opium Wars in which the British had forced China to
A British official explained that they mean a great deal to us and we would be wearing them all the same.
*
En route to China
in June 1840
to act against the Chinese
an Englishman
of the HMS Modeste
experienced
a bittersweet
reunion.
On the 20th the island of Penang was in sight;
a spot that recalls to my memory many happy days; when,
having just passed my examination for lieutenant,
and full of hope
I gaily wandered over its verdant hills,
while day after day fled rapidly by
amidst the joyous group of my first and warmest friends.
Alas! where are they now?
*
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
Private Sky
Rain spreads across
the canopy as trees
close over the path
that village made of
cloud, the secrecy
of close high trees,
thin stems of their
memorial, the list
of their private
green, the manor
disappearing behind
its walls, our dreams
spreading out over
the rise, a squad
mown down by rain.
Gurney Drive, Penang
There was an outdoor gym
near the pier. We went there.
Did we have an argument?
I can’t remember why
we went. Were we speaking?
I can’t hear anything. All there is
is the gym gear and us
standing there, present but
absent. Two reeds from
the opium-dependent fens.
A hallucination from
Grasmere. I saw sailors
moving around as though
it were a film set. It was
a film set. I put on my frock coat
and turned to go. The ship
was sailing shortly.
UNESCO
hovered in the present like a sunset,
over the future like a UFO.
*
These poems come from the collection Poppy. ‘Serre Road Cemetery No. 2’ is a collage poem incorporating text from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Denise Riley’s ‘A gramaphone on the subject’, a letter from Edwin Lutyens to his wife Emily Lytton, Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel, Maria Logan’s ‘To Opium’, Sara Coleridge's ‘Poppies’, Narrative of the Expedition to China by John Elliot Bingham and 'The Dead’ by Rupert Brooke.
*
Joseph Minden is a poet and secondary school teacher. His recent books are Poppy (Carcanet) and Paddock calls: The Nightbook (slub press). Past publications include The Beef Onion with Will Harris and Hugh Foley, Derivatives with Kat Addis, Woodvale with the Beam-eye Babies and Diptych Brian (all from The Minutes Press); and Soft Hans (The Koppel Press).
