Sitting alone on a garden chair

in quietly falling orange, amber

and crimson light, a language of colour ,

I live inside a kaleidoscope:

a glorious film in technicolour.

Sunset flakes perch on my head,

my skirt, my arms. Stained glass triangular

shards floating down in russet and red

remind me of the Albert Hall.

Poppies, the shed blood of Remembrance

silently fall from a plaster sky,

pattering down the aisles in silence

on airmen’s caps and nurses uniforms;

each petal a life, a father, a sister,

their blood on the earth; grief after the storms.

How much was buried with every brother?

The trees will soon be grey and bare,

bone-limbed and stiff in nights of frost,

their summer days of glory over,

even as those whose spring was lost.

Kathy Butler