The battlefield may have healed,
but the trenches are still there.
Now the field blooms red.
Poppies scatter across hillsides
like little mouths left open,
soft and crimson,
fed by something buried deep below.
From a distance,
it looks beautiful.
That is how these things survive
by learning how to disguise themselves.
The earth sealed over long ago.
No smoke.
No sirens.
No fresh graves left exposed to weather.
Only quiet dips in the ground
where damage once lived violently.
Only careful hands
pulling sleeves lower
when the seasons change.
The battlefield may have healed,
but the trenches are still there.
Sometimes they ache in cold weather.
Sometimes in warm.
Sometimes for no reason at all.
And beneath the poppies,
the soil still remembers
every place it was split open.
I think that is what scares me the most,
not the ruin itself,
but how ordinary it becomes.
How the body adapts
to carrying small private wars.
How people compliment the flowers
without noticing
what feeds them.
Every spring,
the field blooms red again.
May 10
May 10, 2026 at 5:57 PM UTC
The battlefield may have healed,
but the trenches are still there.
Now the field blooms red.
Poppies scatter across hillsides
like little mouths left open,
soft and crimson,
fed by something buried deep below.
From a distance,
it looks beautiful.
That is how these things survive
by learning how to disguise themselves.
The earth sealed over long ago.
No smoke.
No sirens.
No fresh graves left exposed to weather.
Only quiet dips in the ground
where damage once lived violently.
Only careful hands
pulling sleeves lower
when the seasons change.
The battlefield may have healed,
but the trenches are still there.
Sometimes they ache in cold weather.
Sometimes in warm.
Sometimes for no reason at all.
And beneath the poppies,
the soil still remembers
every place it was split open.
I think that is what scares me the most,
not the ruin itself,
but how ordinary it becomes.
How the body adapts
to carrying small private wars.
How people compliment the flowers
without noticing
what feeds them.
Every spring,
the field blooms red again.
