Yesterday, on a friend’s recommendation,  I visited the village of Hackness, where they had gone to great lengths to do something special for the Armistice commemorations. You can read about it here: poppies 

I was moved by the dedication that creating so many hand crochet poppies took, each one a tiny offering, a tiny act of personal remembrance which added up to a wave of remembrance, of people finding the humanity in each other and sharing something. All day today there will be canons firing and torches being lit and wreathes being laid and politicians trying to out do each other with poppies on their lapels and the media ripping to pieces anyone who doesn’t wear a poppy. There will be grand, huge gestures, marches, brass bands, hours of TV coverage interspersed with adverts for Christmas gifts and Black Friday sales, and that’s a part of today too, but the actions of this small village out do all this. There will have been planning; a committee meeting in a village hall, and designated crochet duties, and children from the tiny village school will have helped and learned, and someone will have made sure everyone had a part to play, and the result is generosity, kindness and true remembrance in small acts of memorial.

I’m hoping to post two posts today, because I want to talk about poet Antony Owen later. Antony is a peace campaigner who uses poetry to explore war and the repercussions of war, he deserves his own post. But for this first post I wanted to share a poem which appeared in Dream Catcher Magazine no. 37 It’s by Susan Wallace.