Poppies

A voice says “Cry out.”

And I said “What shall I cry?”

“All people are like grass,

and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,

Because the breath of the Lord blows on them.

Surely the people are the grass.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,

But the word of our God endures forever.”

Isaiah 40, 6-8

November is an emotional month for me and my family. On November 21, 1998, my 37-year-old husband died after a long fight with leukemia, and we faced Thanksgiving that year emptied and numb. Christmas was even worse. It was a darkness and a grief I don’t forget, despite all the healing and living that has followed.

Five years later, on November 18, at age 41, I gave birth to my first child. I'd not imagined I'd be a parent so late in my life, but my son Rohan's birth felt very much like "the breath of the Lord" blowing on withered grass and fallen flowers. It was also the first time I’d been back inside a hospital since Michael died, so it was remarkable to walk out the doors with a newborn, feeling new-born myself, and strong, rather than desperate and bereft. Every November since, I celebrate my son’s birthday before I face my late husband’s death, and within those three days I experience again the expanse of what it means to be human: immense sorrow; incredible joy.

As we move through Advent we face that same expanse in the imagery, music, and messages of the season. For those of us privileged with good health and a home and enough to eat, the season twinkles with images of the baby born in a manger and the star that led the faithful to him. But we also carry our private losses and the seemingly insurmountable challenges of our diverse and dependent humanity on this planet. Our collective images include darkness, great suffering and loss, and our celebration of the holy birth happens with the knowledge that there will be suffering commensurate with the gifts we receive as children of God. How do we bear this? How do we live meaningfully in the face of it?

In my professional life I teach poetry, including poetry of witness - poems written out of conditions of political extremity. One of the images I’ve carried this Fall is the sea of 888,246 ceramic poppies, “planted” between July 17 and November 11 of this year, to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of WWI. The installation, titled “Blood swept lands and seas of red,” (the opening line of an anonymous poem credited to a WWI soldier), poured from the “weeping window” of the Tower of London, and filled the moat before it was concluded on Armistice Day. I’m haunted by the beauty and tragedy of the exhibit – by that “spill” of blood and the beauty of the flowers that symbolize the lives given in service and too soon. I’m moved also by the more than 5 million people who visited to pay their respects and to honor and remember the fallen, and whose financial donations bought those flowers to fund organizations committed to healing the physical and emotional wounds of military service people.

That spill of blood and the beauty of flowers that symbolize both death and renewal are images for our Christian faith as well. This season those poppies in the moat seem to anticipate the poinsettias that will illuminate chancels at Christmas, and I’m moved, always, by the power of art to embody our losses, our hope and our faith, and in the words of Isaiah, to “cry out” in every voice and on every subject, through all the seasons.

Rebecca Wee is mother of Rohan and Maren, a poet, and a professor of English at Augustana College.