poppies

Here's the installation at the Tower of London, Paul Cummins's Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red - commemorating World War One, with 888, 246 poppies being staked into the ground between now and Armistice Day, each one representing a life lost in the British Military. It's a great flowing sea of red, that truly (I find, going on line) needs to be seen from the air: the moat looks as though it's completely, deeply stained with blood.  What was clear, apart from the horrible beauty, was how many conversations it was engendering among the crowd who was there - not just the one I heard in which a woman was wondering how they were going to mow the grass (has she ever seen how and where poppies actually grow?); but the parents explaining to their children the scale of war, and all those people who never came home.