“Poppies” is a poem written by Anglo-Italian poet Jane Weir. It appears in Exit Wounds, a collection commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy in 2009. Weir has described “Poppies” as “a contemporary war poem about war in its various guises.” The poem focuses on the complex balance between a mother’s love for her child and the terror and anxiety she experiences as she prepares for him to exit their home; it is heavily implied that the son is entering into war as a soldier. The mother’s sadness represents the fears felt by loved ones due to the devastation war can cause and has caused in the past. Weir deliberately left the specific conflict that the son may be entering into and other details in the poem ambiguous, seeking to create a poem that was both “concise and contemporary, but also historically classic, in terms of universal experience.”
Weir’s poem fit into an open invitation by U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy for poets to write work regarding the loss of lives in the Afghan and Iraq wars of the twentieth century. Duffy believed that it is a poet’s duty to bear witness, including to the horrors of war. “Poppies” responds to this call in a unique way, by focusing upon the harm that war can cause to the parents of those who fight and even perish in the conflict, and by contrasting this risk with the innocence of childhood. “Poppies” is now taught as part of the standardized English literature curriculum in the United Kingdom secondary education system.
Jane Weir is a writer and designer who has published three full-length poetry collections as well as two pamphlets, and various biographies. Her poems are diverse both in subject and theme, but their common thread is their close attention to detail and exploration of human emotions.
