A mother pins a poppy on her son's blazer as he leaves home, holds back from touching him, and after he has gone walks to the war memorial, hoping to hear his childhood voice on the wind.
How Weir's domestic and textile imagery, the symbols of the poppy, the songbird and the dove, and long, enjambed sentences show a mother's love, fear and grief.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Three days before Armistice Sunday', 'spasms of paper red', 'Sellotape bandaged around my hand', 'steeled the softening / of my face', 'flattened, rolled, turned into felt', 'the world overflowing / like a treasure chest', 'released a song bird from its cage', 'leaned against it like a wishbone', 'your playground voice catching on the wind'.
Form: free verse in long, enjambed sentences addressed to the son, moving from the morning he leaves to the mother's walk to the war memorial, with caesuras that slow the poem and hold back her feelings.
Context: Jane Weir, an Anglo-Italian writer and textile designer who grew up in Manchester; the poem, dated 2005, printed in 2009 in Exit Wounds, the war poems Carol Ann Duffy gathered for the Guardian as the war in Afghanistan escalated; and the remembrance poppy and Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday of November, marked at war memorials across Britain.
Compares well with: Catrin (a mother and a child growing apart), Exposure (the cost of war at home and at the front) and What Were They Like? (loss and remembrance).
