Poppies

Humanity is a field of poppies.

Tepid summers pluck seedlings and rest them in sodden plains.

Each bursts roots thrusting into soil of eons past.

Folding, bending, twisting and contorting…

Running together like schoolchildren in the village

None have foreseen the winter to come.

Frigid winds strike with savage intentions.

Acrid, adverse, and ablaze in spite…

At first the seedlings hold together,

but soon they desert one another.

Spring arrives with incandescence and rains.

The race for bloom begins.

Seedlings become sprouts of malice

—each abandons the clan

—each detaches and spites the others

Unity has disappeared like the hand of an illusionist

behind the veil of enigma.

Summer returns as a passionate inferno.

Smells of cotton breezes and sounds of cicadas flood the azure skies.

The sprouts have blossomed vermilion petals,

But each has kept a mark of its history, its honored malevolence.

The poison it creates is used by others of its own kind.

Intoxicating, envenoming, corroding…

Its only hope for escape is death by the Afghan’s blade.