Remember

Remember (9″ x 9″ ink on watercolour paper)

Starting with a poppy in the centre of this mandala seemed in tune with this time of year. Poppies and remembering.

Life is rather unsettled at the moment so it may be a while before I watercolour this. I wanted to share the black and white version anyway – since black and white also seems in tune with November.

Tom’s stirring poem:

Storm winds blow the scattered leaves of autumn
through the empty air, across the fields,
into ditches, craters, holes, and trenches
where a sniper aims for lost ideals:
service, duty, glory, resolution,
patriotic feeling, good and right,
huddled in the rank’s malign confusion
readying to rise and charge and strike.
The minutes tick around the face of time
measuring the heartbeats of the dead
breathing in the shadows, asking why
the blood of men so innocent is shed
for empire and for nation and for fear,
when all who seem so far are truly near.

In memory of Private George Lawrence Price, the last Canadian to die in WWI, two minutes before the Armistice:

http://www.inthefootsteps.com/canada-last-hundred-days.html

image (c) 2018 Hilary Farmer
poem (c) 2018 TJ Radcliffe

 

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