Pat Dalpiaz and Joey LIVE streamed the ceremony at City Hall
Jim Dalpiaz played taps.
In Flanders Fields.
was penned by Lieut. Col. John M. McCrae, Canadian physician and soldier, during the First World War, following the first German chemical attack, early spring 1916, Second Battle of Ypres. Bonescattered torn and trampled fields germinated scarlet poppies and so many, many simple white crosses. The fallen went from war to peace.
In Flanders Fields was first published in London Punch December 1915. By March 1916, American newspapers carried the poem ( including Norwich Bulletin, and KY Citizen, June, 1916) McCrae died in France in 1918, and there rests in peace and vitality.
The common poppies sway by design, are tall and reaching; their architecture flings the seeds further and their flowers appear to open and close, intermittent as firecracker displays. (Individual flowers bloom for (mostly) a day, but the one plant will produce hundreds of flowers over the season.) The large translucent blooms indeed blow, glow and grow. Those adjectives in the first line opener of McCrae’s poem have swapped around in different versions. “Blow” it is.
Good Morning Gloucester 