Red Poppies Quotes & Sayings

Quantin crept closer to the knoll. A pungent smell passed through his nostrils up into his brain. Attracted by the poppies' scarlet smears, he was about to take another step when he felt a hand on his elbow. A man in a poppy-red jacket, his pupils dilated, smiled warningly.
"No strangers allowed. Go away."
"I don't understand ... "
"Understanding is strictly forbidden. Even dreams have the right to dream. Isn't that so? Now go away. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I love color. It must submit to me. And I love art. I kneel before it, and it must become mine. Everything around me glows with passion. Every day reveals a new red flower, glowing, scarlet red. Everyone around me carries them. Some wear them quietly hidden in their hearts. And they are like poppies just opening, of which one can see only here and there a hint of red petal peeking out from the green bud. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I am poppies in the field
Red and cold
I am sleeping alone
and
I am light
I am light
I am light — Bella Betina

Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain-soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children. — Pablo Neruda

There are men in frock coats and top hats with the blood of the world on their hands, and they eat with silver forks and white napkins every day, and they will give up their last breath in a linen-made bed whilst the ones they sent out to die lie forgotten in the earth, mouldering bones with the poppies fat and red above 'em. Ah, mankind. — Paul Kearney

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?' — Tom Hiddleston

As often is the case after a powerful, destructive storm, it was an achingly beautiful day. Even so late in the summer, I could still hear the occasional skylark singing, and the fields were speckled with red poppies. — Patrice Kindl

Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?
If I could bleed, or sleep!
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.
But colorless. Colorless. — Sylvia Plath

We owned a garden on a hill,
We planted rose and daffodil,
Flowers that English poets sing,
And hoped for glory in the Spring.
We planted yellow hollyhocks,
And humble sweetly-smelling stocks,
And columbine for carnival,
And dreamt of Summer's festival.
And Autumn not to be outdone
As heiress of the summer sun,
Should doubly wreathe her tawny head
With poppies and with creepers red.
We waited then for all to grow,
We planted wallflowers in a row.
And lavender and borage blue, -
Alas! we waited, I and you,
But love was all that ever grew. — Vita Sackville-West

I look down at the picture in my hand. It's home, the image slightly dog-eared after two years in various grab bags and holdalls. There's the house, white walls covered in the blue flowers she loves, red poppies stretching away in the background. There's my mother, small and fair, hair falling out of its bun as usual, glasses - one of her many eccentricities - perched on her nose. — Amie Kaufman

Such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn. — Thomas Hood

Scarlet the poppies
Blue the corn-flowers,
Golden the wheat.
Gold for the Eternal:
Blue for Our Lady:
Red for the five
Wounds of her Son. — Adelaide Crapsey

A girl who never smiles has such power - what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace. — Catherynne M Valente

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

I survived, carried on, glad to be like a weed, a wild red poppy, rooted in life. — Marilyn Buck