poppies

He’s decked out in red.  It’s the traditional uniform of the Beefeaters, who are the soldiers who guard the Tower of London.  Or something like that.  He stands in the center of the green grass outside the walls amidst a sea of red poppies.

To be fair, they aren’t real poppies.  They’re ceramic, and they’re “planted” in the green grass outside the Tower of London for a very specific and important reason.

The Beefeater reads yet another name from the list in front of him.  It’s a name that to someone somewhere might mean something, but the meaning has been watered down by another one hundred years of British history.  It’s a name that may be neatly printed on a family tree somewhere, or maybe it’s scrawled on the back of a yellowing photograph stashed away in some forgotten shoebox or chest.

It could also be a name that means nothing to anyone anywhere, because the people of the world we live in can be that horrible, cold, and indifferent.

A breeze flutters across the ramparts of the Tower from the Thames.  If these poppies were real, they’d bend and sway in the breeze just like they did (and still do) in France all those years ago, but these poppies are different.  They stand straight and rigid, at perpetual attention, just like the young men did as their sergeants inspected them before shipping out to places like Verdun and the Somme to fight what they thought/hoped/believed would be the last war that anyone would ever have to fight.

The sun has, for the moment, set on this particular portion of the British Empire.  Cars and taxis and pedestrians make their way over the streets of London, airplanes full of businessmen and vacationers hum silently overhead from Gatwick to any and every corner of the planet, and tourists of all creeds and colors snap photos of each other to commemorate their European summer holiday.

In the glow of a single light, the Beefeater reads yet another name from the list in front of him.  Surrounded by 888,246 ceramic red poppies in the shadow of the Tower of London, he makes a weary and sincere effort to think of the young man who is now little more than a faded memory and red ceramic poppy, because being remembered is all anyone can ever hope for, and sometimes the only gift you can give someone is the only gift they’d ever want.