Poppy Fields Quotes

I am poppies in the field Red and cold I am sleeping alone and I am light I am light I am light

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn saw sunset glow Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields Take up our quarrel with the foe; To you, from falling hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Mindful awareness lets us find peace amidst chaos and cultivate resilience that sparks happiness. Even in the barren fields of our emotions, the poppies of happiness can surprisingly grow bountifully. (Love, Happiness, and Insight)

Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit

Don’t forget what he means to me, Poppy. I’ve known him my whole damn life,” he said. “We shared the same crib more times than not. We took our first steps together. Sat at the same table most nights, refusing to eat the same vegetables We explored tunnels and lakes, pretended that fields were new, undiscovered kingdoms. We were inseparable. And that didn’t change as we grew older.” His voice roughened, and he dropped his forehead to mind. “He was and still is a part of me.

As often is the case after a powerful, destructive storm, it was an achingly beautiful day. Even so late in the summer, I could still hear the occasional skylark singing, and the fields were speckled with red poppies.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Modern Bombay, in a sense, has its genesis in the poppy fields of Bihar.

In the deep spring when the grass was green on fields and foothills, when the lupines and poppies made a splendid blue and gold earth, when the great trees awakened in yellow-green young leaves, then there was no more lovely place in the world. It was no beauty you could ignore by being used to it. It caught you in the throat in the morning and made a pain of pleasure in the pit of your stomach when the sun went down over it.

Mother, he is a gentleman. He is a builder with bricks of moonlight. He knows the secret places of the earth. He washes the sleep from the eyes of the souls. He lets them look on beauty. He lets them tell him they hate him. In the mornings, I gather berries and apples. I scrub his back with rind. I weave spider-spit, eyelash. He talks in his sleep: pudding, fire, discus, the things he misses. He breathes, Your body is my orchard. I am undulating grass. I am a field of wheat he parts with his fingers. Poppies bloom in my veins. When he kisses me, he tastes pomegranate. The night crawls nearer. The moans of the dead roll and swell. Mother, we are well.

What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets....

All of us are navigating our own personal yellow brick roads. Some of us are still asleep in the poppy field; some of us remain content with the material pleasures of the Emerald City. Some of us still think that the Wizard is great and powerful and follow his arbitrary commands to curry favor, while others have seen the man behind the curtain and have become disillusioned or feel betrayed. For the rest of us, once we acknowledge that our hearts’ desires lie in our own backyard—inside of us—we’ll be closer to home. And there’s no place like home.

The women here are so white,” Rin marveled. “Like the girls in wall paintings.” The skin tones she observed from the caravan had moved up the color gradient the farther north they drove. She knew that the people of the northern provinces were industrialists and businessmen. They were citizens of class and means; they didn’t labor in the fields like Tikany’s farmers did. But she hadn’t expected the differences to be this pronounced. “They’re pale as their corpses will be,” Tutor Feyrik said dismissively. “They’re terrified of the sun.

on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.

My existence is an exercise in futility

They look so relaxed, so happily engaged in the present moment, these four women drinking cappuccinos and savoring the creamy cannolis.

The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opium trade. Previously, the United States' policy was to not get deeply involved in internal Afghani drug issues; now we've changed the policy and are actively working to eradicate the drugs. But nobody has yet to come up with a way to shut down the poppy fields and get the Afghani people back to work. Until that happens, the Taliban will inevitable creep back in.

She was an enigma and a contradiction. Partly truth, partly fiction. Partly God, partly human. A moment you loathed her, the subsequent you wanted to be her. She was so friendly yet so cold and distant, so arrogant yet so humble.

It’s amazing how much can happen in a few weeks on the road. This was going to become a habit to me; seeing new places would become like a drug. Better than drugs. And there was a whole world still to discover. I was as optimistic as a junkie in a poppy field.

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.

The beauty of cathedrals, churches, marriage, heaven and the Elysian fields will forever be ingrained in my head as the beauty these eyes lost the chance to see but the beauty of the poppy fields near the French countryside will forever be the one my eyes will never regret witnessing.

Revelation comes with these misunderstandings. Stuart's life and way of thinking momentarily exposed. Like a break in the hedgerow during the country lane part of a journey. For an instant you glimpse scenery you haven't seen before - fields of poppy and cornflower, trees gnarled in the shape of demons.

If you sneer at religion as the opiate of the masses, you must sneer also at the brain, because the receptors are there. You must sneer at the body, which knows how to feel that bliss. What I mean is, a sweet look of lying down in poppy fields, of feeling control finally by giving over control, a look of wild and then tame relinquishment.

She was my idea of Royalty, peaceful yet poised.

I was just a kid when I first met Bella, but I knew she was someone special, something otherworldly and someone who would leave a searing golden lesion on me.

I was a lost soul at 19 when I achieved retribution and salvation in the form of a blonde, blue eyed woman named Delilah Gange. She was The Great Awakening of the 18th century.

and in the space that he had occupied in her memory she allowed a field of poppies to bloom.

But we were not orphans, we were children of the world, and we could see what was beautiful in the world, so why would we remain slaves?

She oftentimes just slept in her room in an involuntarily solitary confinement adding to the explosive aura of enigmatic self- arrest.

The ceaseless rain is falling fast, And yonder gilded vane, Immovable for three days past, Points to the misty main, It drives me in upon myself And to the fireside gleams, To pleasant books that crowd my shelf, And still more pleasant dreams, I read whatever bards have sung Of lands beyond the sea, And the bright days when I was young Come thronging back to me. In fancy I can hear again The Alpine torrent's roar, The mule-bells on the hills of Spain, The sea at Elsinore. I see the convent's gleaming wall Rise from its groves of pine, And towers of old cathedrals tall, And castles by the Rhine. I journey on by park and spire, Beneath centennial trees, Through fields with poppies all on fire, And gleams of distant seas. I fear no more the dust and heat, No more I feel fatigue, While journeying with another's feet O'er many a lengthening league. Let others traverse sea and land, And toil through various climes, I turn the world round with my hand Reading these poets' rhymes. From them I learn whatever lies Beneath each changing zone, And see, when looking with their eyes, Better than with mine own.

She was all I had ever dreamt of being. She was beautiful, more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. She was intelligent, smarter than anyone I had ever met. When poised and quiet, she had an impact on people anyways, a statue and incarnate of everything revered in a woman, yet when she spoke, you did not know how to thank what deity for having been graced to be in the presence of someone like her. She did not speak as I did, and she spoke so little.

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep: And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers...

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below We are the Dead Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow/Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders Fields Take up our quarrel with the foe To you from failing hands we throw The torch be yours to hold it high If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep/though poppies grow In Flanders Fields

Giacomo was walking as usual but with an additional bounce in his step for he was after all going over to Delilah Gange’s house, hers was the best and the poshest of the village yet her disposition was kind and of humility yet polished and admirable.

I was 17, living a fever dream with eyes full of stars, and she was Paris. If I was the slave, she was the Queen ruling over the regime. If I was a mortal French woman, she was a goddess. Wherever she went, whatever she said I followed suit, heart in my hands.

God, she was beautiful. She was so beautiful her image and her laugh and her picturesque face and odour lingered and stay etched upon and echoed across the multitude of chambers in her subconscious psyche. She tried to count the stars in the night sky like the freckles on the blonde’s nose. She thought of her lips being the clouds of stardust that stayed around the night sky, so distracting yet not really spoken about. She thought of the Moon being her eyes, so wide and big and bright. Her beauty was transient and translucent like the night sky.

The rose- petalled, gaunt and veined fingers met the shorter and calloused ones, and the hands of fate went to work at making the beauty of the current surceasing interlude outweigh the consequences and shroud the disillusionment of any adoration in eventuality with oblivion.

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone.

syringe. “Cheers to you.” Tillie took the syringe, and Tom turned away. She could use her arm, but unbuttoning the ten pearl buttons of her sleeve was too difficult with a single hand. Instead, she pulled her petticoats and silk skirt up her thigh, not caring that she was an unmarried woman in the presence of an unmarried man. Against her pale skin, there were tiny bruises everywhere, like a field of ill-looking poppies. Tillie found a new spot, slipped the needle beneath her skin, and pushed the medicine in. She sighed and handed the syringe back to Tom, who drew up a dose for himself.

By not burning their poppy fields to the ground but instead maintaining a security umbrella that international development agencies could safely work under as they improved these ordinary people's lives, we would win their 'hearts and minds' in the classic manifestation of a successful counter-insutgency operation. [...] Maybe our Western values world somebe instilled in these people. But in country where the average life expectancy was 42 and with the price of that life coming in contrasting cheap at $10 plus the bonus of martyrdom, or alien values might just as equally not be snapped up.

Beautiful and perhaps the most beautiful of the land though Bellatrix Garden was, an alluring enchantress owning up to her name to the most beautiful that France had to offer, what was surplus in exquisite splendour was compensated for by negate of intellect and mere existence of a hedonistic tendency.

I am nine. We are bored and Karen is dying. We drove to Austin that summer so Sarah's dad- who described Karen as /the great and impossible love/ of his life, who taught us the word /lymphoma/ and then, the concept of the prefix, how it explains where the tumor lives- could say goodbye. The house is a rind spooned out by the onset of death, what's left in the medicine cabinet full of razors & we are hungry & alone & sitting on the living room floor where the light from a naked window slices the hardwood like a melon, brandishes each, individualfuzz on my scabbed calf a field of erect, yellow poppies & we have been alive as girls long enough to know to scowl at this reveal & what better time than now to practice removal. Once, I watched my mother skin a potato in six perfect strokes I remember this as Sarah teaches me to prop up my leg on the side of the tub and runs the blade along my thing, /See?/ she says, /Isn't that so much better?/ Before we left Albuquerque her father warned us, /She will have no hair/ a trait we have just begun to admire except, of course for the hair he is talking about we hold against our necks, that which will get us compliments or scouted in a mall, eventually cut off by our envious sisters while we sleep.

Dimly Kev remembered one of the mythology stories the Hathaways were so fond of... the Greek one about Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnapping the maiden Persephone in a flowery field and dragging her down through an opening in the earth. Down to his dark, private world where he could possess her. Although the Hathaway daughters had all been indignant about Persephone's fate, Kev's sympathies had privately been on Hades' side. Romany culture tended to romanticize the idea of kidnapping a woman for one's bride, even mimicking it during their courtship rituals. "I don't see why eating a mere half-dozen pomegranate seeds should have condemned Persephone to stay with Hades part of every year," Poppy had said in outrage. "No one told her the rules. It wasn't fair. I'm certain she would never have touched a thing, had she known what would happen." "And it wasn't a very filling snack," Beatrix had added, perturbed. "If I'd been there, I would have asked for a pudding or a jam pastry, at least." "Perhaps she wasn't altogether unhappy, having to stay," Win had suggested, her eyes twinkling. "After all, Hades did make her his queen. And the story says he possessed 'the riches of the earth.'" "A rich husband," Amelia had said, "doesn't change the fact that Persephone's main residence is in an undesirable location with no view whatsoever. Just think of the difficulties in leasing it out during the off-months." They had all agreed that Hades was a complete villain. But Kev had understood exactly why the underworld god had stolen Persephone for his bride. He had wanted a little bit of sunshine, of warmth, for himself, down in the cheerless gloom of his dark palace.

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most . . . No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice . . . but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different . . . Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips".

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Who are you? She asked silently, as she laid away the collector's quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: "Come live with me and be my love..." interleaved with menus: 'oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb.' The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.

But the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear.

On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

Slip from the state of mindfulness and, before you know it, the first thought will appear. The bloom of the first poppy in the field. And then the second one too. An exponential progression of blooms you can no longer contain. One day, half of what you see is green. The next day, you find your once green meadow washed completely in the color of rubies. Your mind has turned into a bein-sar, an opium-eater, intoxicated with the seeds of the worldly.

The Garden of Proserpine" Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams. I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep. Here life has death for neighbour, And far from eye or ear Wan waves and wet winds labour, Weak ships and spirits steer; They drive adrift, and whither They wot not who make thither; But no such winds blow hither, And no such things grow here. No growth of moor or coppice, No heather-flower or vine, But bloomless buds of poppies, Green grapes of Proserpine, Pale beds of blowing rushes Where no leaf blooms or blushes Save this whereout she crushes For dead men deadly wine. Pale, without name or number, In fruitless fields of corn, They bow themselves and slumber All night till light is born; And like a soul belated, In hell and heaven unmated, By cloud and mist abated Comes out of darkness morn. Though one were strong as seven, He too with death shall dwell, Nor wake with wings in heaven, Nor weep for pains in hell; Though one were fair as roses, His beauty clouds and closes; And well though love reposes, In the end it is not well. Pale, beyond porch and portal, Crowned with calm leaves, she stands Who gathers all things mortal With cold immortal hands; Her languid lips are sweeter Than love's who fears to greet her To men that mix and meet her From many times and lands. She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born; Forgets the earth her mother, The life of fruits and corn; And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn. There go the loves that wither, The old loves with wearier wings; And all dead years draw thither, And all disastrous things; Dead dreams of days forsaken, Blind buds that snows have shaken, Wild leaves that winds have taken, Red strays of ruined springs. We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; To-day will die to-morrow; Time stoops to no man's lure; And love, grown faint and fretful, With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps that no loves endure. From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.

She drives him home. It is five in the morning. ‘I’ve never made love all night,’ she says. Her right hand rests in his…She drives with her left. They pass the cornbread meadow—a field covered with yellow poppies and black and white cows motionless in the blue mist. Sleeping. A small spread of land in the middle of civilization…it is almost dawn. The streets are peaceful. The world does not hurt at such an hour. There is time. -from Who Has Known Heights: The Mystique Memoirs of a Melancholic Mind

He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stocks on a golden evening; because the sheep’s tails would rattle when they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short, unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because the stars were brighter in puddles than in the sky; because there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks-in-boxes, or like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him; because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark-returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God’s greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of sleep.

IT HAD NEVER been such a beautiful May. Every day the sky shone a peerless blue, untouched by cloud. Already, the gardens were crammed with lupins, roses, delphiniums, honeysuckle, and lime clouds of lady’s mantle. Insects cricked, hovered, bumbled, and whizzed. Harold passed fields of buttercups, poppies, ox-eye daisies, clover, vetch, and campion. The hedgerows were sweetly scented with bowing heads of elderflower, and wound through with wild clematis, hops, and dog roses. The allotments too were burgeoning. There were rows of lettuce, spinach, chard, beetroot, early new potatoes, and wigwams of peas. The first of the gooseberries hung like hairy green pods.

The back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake. At the bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the early summer. To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen Anne’s lace.

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream. The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element. The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thick poppy seed filling we use in our rugelach and hamantaschen, and then a layer of honey-roasted whole apricots and vanilla pastry cream. This will get covered in vanilla buttercream.

I had no idea that the loss of marijuana income had led to the Mexican, South American, and Chinese drug cartels plowing under their marijuana fields to plant poppies and to flood the United States market with cheap and affordable heroin. This

Take up our quarrel with the foe! To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high! If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

are the Dead,” she thought, remembering the war poem. “Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved…” Ellen Adams looked behind her at the relatives watching her. Then back to the blankets, like a field of poppies.

field of poppies in endless summer.

There is a special rung in hell reserved for people who waste good coffee. And seeing how, at any given moment, you may be rapping on the door momentarily, I am impelled by moral compulsion to either wait outside till you have finished yours or sit here and continue speaking with you.

After what felt like ages and aeons and probably centuries, Pyrrhus took a long swig from a glass of whiskey and after winking at his reflection left the room, feeling taller than he was when he entered, way before he put on a façade of cunning and a shield of apathy and masqueraded amongst all others as a person of sane tenor.

What concentration of one being an English rose did one blonde, French woman need?

Could not it be that one person could have the amount of beauty the same as that of another and not paramount?

She was every bit as beautiful as her name dictates and suggests, perhaps in the increment.

She never was rich or of a superior lineage but something about Delilah’s air and face made the disillusionment indistinguishable and somewhat tangible and not tantalizing.

A poll of millennials taken in 2018 found that a majority believed boomers had “made things worse” for their generation. What could they be referring to? The boomers have started no world wars, conscripted no soldiers, launched no breadlines. There is nothing in their record to compare with the pile of corpses at Passchendaele. The only fields of poppies planted on their account have been in Kandahar, not memorially.

What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old raxist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Market... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the bllight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...

There was a lone poppy-head in the field that was saving its thoughts on a pile in the wood and when it had shaken its fear of motion it borrowed a sugar bowl at a small train station and dispatched this letter I am always so alone I miss your fine tentacles My skin is no longer smoked Now I belong to that order of birds who let others hatch their eggs Come I send sweetest regards

2012 Andy’s Correspondence   Young, Young, Young, you do have a way with words. Your seductive writing is temptation for me to lust after you, not to mention your romantic description of our lovemaking. You’ve charmed me to irresistible covetousness. LOL!               None of my other charges had the magnetism that you did. I’m sure you knew that during our time together. As much as I adored Albert, I was not smitten by him as with you. It would be cynical of me to say I don’t feel the connection you and I shared even to this day. Love never dissipates but grows with each passing day. This emotion lies dormant and buried within our subconscious until the right moment triggers its resurgence. I believe you already know my sentiment. Need I say more?☺               The poppy-field experience was just one of many soul connections we shared in our journey through oneness and unity. As Laozi wrote in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao; as soon as it is named, a dichotomy is created, and it is lost. Oneness means just that: only one. The instant we label or name it, it’s something else — it’s no longer unity…

2012 Continuation of My Message to Andy   Our simultaneous out-of-body experience was a once-in-a-lifetime one. To be honest with you, Andy, since that “perfect” day at the Keukenhof Gardens, I have not achieved that heavenly occurrence again.               Do you recall our subsequent Zentology sessions with Monsieur Dubois? He went to great lengths to describe what he saw when he found us at the poppy field? His words rang clearly in my mind. This was how he explained our “astral projection.” He said, “One of the reasons I’m interested in spiritual travel is that it provides a unique means of approaching distant and extraordinary states of transcendent awareness; especially that of sexual mysticism. This sui generis experience exposes the seeker to a series of spiritual lessons to his or her identity, therefore providing the soul the freedom to journey to various non-physical dimensions. These lessons introduce the traveler to a variety of psychic and metaphysical states, where individual freedom and spiritual awareness are heightened to insurmountable ecstasies. In addition, astral projection provides an inner laboratory where the seeker can experiment with techniques and methods of moving through our limited psychic consciousness, delving into distant realities, what we spiritualists call ‘exploring the heavenly states.’ We loosely term the experience ‘Nirvana,’ turning faith and hope into confidence and spiritual enlightenment. He continued, “That brings me to Sahasrāra chakra. This is the seat of the parabindu (the supreme bindu), the merging of Kundalini Shakti and Shiva, which emanate from this location. The liberation you and Andy attained is what Hindus believe to be the highest unification of the individual with the universe. “Above Brahma-randhra (‘the cave of Brahma’) is a hole in the crown of the head. It is through this opening that the soul escapes after death. This is the Sahasrāra chakra. When the soul separates from the physical body, the Brahma-randhra bursts open, freeing the soul from its confines through the ‘Door to Pure Consciousness’ or the ‘Door of Liberation.’ The Hindus call this perforation – Kapala Moksha.

In Flanders Fields           In Flanders fields the poppies blow           Between the crosses, row on row,            That mark our place; and in the sky            The larks, still bravely singing, fly           Scarce heard amid the guns below.           We are the Dead.  Short days ago           We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,            Loved and were loved, and now we lie,                       In Flanders fields.           Take up our quarrel with the foe:           To you from failing hands we throw            The torch; be yours to hold it high.            If ye break faith with us who die           We shall not sleep, though poppies grow                       In Flanders fields. The

the cave at Cumae — "the poppy fields north of Naples" — identified by Virgil as the domicile of the Sibyl, the pagan oracle who had predicted a host of momentous events in the history of Rome including the birth of the Son of the Great God, the long-awaited Messiah. Aeneas, in Virgil's epic, had convinced the Sibyl to lead him through her cave straight into the underworld; just as Dante, writing his Divine Comedy thirteen hundred years later, would enlist Virgil as his guide to the same region — that was the easy part. The hard part was finding the way back.

Coal Town was primed like a john with a hard-on. All they needed was a willing hooker and it would blow.

Across the river, fields of poppies stretched along the bank, the delicate scarlet heads dancing in the breeze, carefree and flourishing.

We walked in silence towards Swinica, beyond which the road, worn by long-distance lorries, twisted and turned; we walked slowly, like one walks after midnight Mass, like my father coming home on Sunday from a fishing trip or from a little game of poker, like the curate after administering extreme unction, like my grandmother returning from the fields dragging a pram, in which instead of her first-born, prematurely dead daughter, there lay a bunch of ripe poppy heads covered with a kerchief.

The mown grass is growing again nearly to our knees; we will take a second crop of hay from this field, rich and green and starred with moon daisies, buttercups and the bright, blowsy heads of poppies.

My lover and I had unconsciously entered the kingdom. Neither of us realized we had attained ‘moksha’ (emancipation, liberation or release) from Saṃsāra - the repeating cycle of birth, life and death. We dwelt in this sensually spirited realm, unaware of time, allowing our unhindered consciousness to guide us towards euphoric provenance, where all things are possible. A distant voice called us to reality. Neither my lover nor I desired to return. With our sacred gyrations suspended, we had not the need for release, but we wanted to sustain the momentum our divinity beckoned us uninterrupted. This was my first and certainly not the last of such subliminal providence.               When we finally egressed from our cogitation, we found the Zentologist dumbfounded and in awe, overwhelmed by what he later described as witnessing the Sahasrāra (“thousand-petaled” – White Lotus) above our heads. The glowing rainbow halo of Kundalini Shanti illuminated my lover and me, encircling our sacred union with asama-prajnata-samadhi – a state in which there is no activity of the mind, no knower, no knowledge, nothing to be known: knowledge, knower and known become unified and liberated.               His virility was deeply buried within my core. My lover and I remained in our Garden of Love. Our guiltlessness deterred us from separation. We abided in this state until our rapturous Samadhi subsided. Only then did we dress and follow my teacher back towards the madding crowd.               That day at the poppy field, Andy and I regained our spiritual eroticism, which the Zentologist canalized as “Divine Providence.

For all the talk about acceptance and rainbows and inclusion, women still wanted the man they were lusting after to lust after them.

Yours is a country of children looking for easy fixes. Take a pill. Snort a line. Cover the pain rather than dealing with it.

I was in search but could not find the missing until I saw the field of poppies

Maybe you saw other countries differently if your experience of them involved watching your mate’s legs boomerang around a poppy field, and it made your Tripadvisor reviews so skewed as to be useless.

In 1915 the Canadian soldier and poet Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote the poem 'In Flanders Fields' about the war and the poppies he'd seen growing on the battlefields. Poppies were the first flowers to grow on the battlefields after the fighting had ended. Their red colour is a symbol of the blood shed and their growth is a sign of new life.

It is a field as big as a football stadium carpeted every inch with bright-red poppies. The red is like the kind of color that you see only in oversaturated photos, the kind that doesn't seem to truly exist in real life. Thousands and thousands of poppies stretch out in front of us, one right after the other, as though if you squinted, it would look like a giant red blanket had been laid on top of thousands of gangly green weeds. Dense olive trees line the edges of the field, and behind them, sloping green hills take over the skyline against a cloudless blue sky. I bend down and pick up a poppy, its inky-black center surrounded by delicate red petals clustered and fanning out. It is all so dreamy.

Fields of opium poppies surrounded the infrequent villages shining their fresh green leaves against the storm-inked sky. Purple lightning danced on the horizon. It had rained here already, and out in the desert we could smell the aromatic camel-thorn as if it was on fire. Yellow lupins mingled with big clumps of mauve and white iris. Kariz itself was pervaded by an overpowering scent, as sweet as bean- flowers, but more languid, more poetic. I walked out to try and place it. The opium flowers called me, glowing in the dusk like lamps of ice.

Turning my head, there was no stopping the smile that lifted the corners of my lips and spread across my face. Before us was a stunning field of flowers with showy red petals and black whorls, swaying slightly in a breeze. “Poppies.

Her favorite part was the end, the march though the field of poppies only to find that the wizard was nothing more than an old man with white hair. Simon was always as disappointed as Dorothy by the revelation, that a wizard could turn out to be just a normal person. But Ruby saw it differently: Normal people, it seemed, could be wizards.

She was everything I had ever wanted to be and so much more. What with her sparkly eyes and animated, gesticulated hands, her beautiful blonde hair cascading down gracefully like silk and her eyes so electric and cheeks the colour of rose. Vivacious and vibrant though she was in her innate talent at being able to hold a conversation with anyone, she loved and prized being alone paramount to being besieged.

Her scent was so distinct, one you could almost never forget, of ocean salt and roses almost as if she was Aphrodite herself, born out of the foam of the sea and despite the godly picturesqueness, she looked so simple and austere like she was just a damsel who had lived near the sea her entire life.

But she was so beautiful, it was all forgiven. She was the kind of beautiful I have seen only in print. She was so beautiful I would do anything she asked me to do. If she asked for the moon, I would put a lasso around it and give it to her. If she asked for the stars, I would spend eternity plucking them off the tapestry of the sky, but I could not give her the sun for she was my Sun, my reason for living, the reason to wake up in the morning.

The house was not much of a house as it was a two- story cottage, austere and quaint, chimney emanating silver smoke and the house bringing forth a smell of homemade food.

Her blonde hair cascaded down her back and shone like they were the abode of an abundance of apollos. Her scent was that of roses and something else he could not place a finger on, a peculiar smell but it works with her royal face and soft mannerisms.

It took a 30 minute walk a few seconds when daydreaming about Gange’s blonde hair and ocean blue eyes and ocean like perfume.

There sat his sister-in-law with her smooth, macramé, onyx hair, a cigarette clasped delicately between her long, elegant fingers. Her hair was dark not as dark as her eyes looking at the windows of the man standing in front of her was not worth the time and gaze. Her bright red lips were parted slightly to reveal her perfectly straight teeth except a crooked one of the bottom but one to not gaze deeply was not one to tell. Were her lips as red as blood or did they seem so against the snow of his skin? She was dressed in all black sitting cross legged, her right over the left and her cheeks were hollowed accentuating her delicate cheekbones. Despite the conjecture that she had hair that did not look the silkiest and her garb was giving a presumption of ragged ancestry, her general stillness of power, and disdain of sentiments coupled with the wine, cigarettes and the leather eclipsed her unruly appearance making the lady look like blasé royalty.

There was nothing quite convicting, per se, about Bellatrix but that her looks isolated her from the others and her harnessing that raw, fragile power along with not caring for others made her even more intimidating.

What is an orphaned charismatic woman without her hellscape of a gossiping village?

There, amongst the green trees and plants and the sounds of crickets, harebells, and heaths, he could breathe for the first time since he had woken up that one day.

Despite the beauty of the gilt scene, Pyrrhus hated this place, loathed it, detested it more than a person had ever detested anything.

The simplicity and serenity of the bland scene made him fantasize and project a life where things were simpler, where things were sweet in the way they were an everyday ritual, where every day was quiet and private, but you could live it in it forever, like the sound of Bellatrix laughing and how he was once allowed to hear it whenever he so pleased. He escaped it too.