The spontaneous placing of poppies

As people queued along the eastern cloister, close to the rolls of honour for World War II, somebody found that you could wedge the wire stem of an artificial poppy between two tablets alongside a particular name. Soon hundreds of people were doing it, not only here but in the opposite cloister, attaching flowers to names from World War I. Day by day the walls became more densely splashed with scarlet as people on their way to and from paying respect to the Unknown Soldier made their own personal gestures in memory of the known, from brothers, husbands and fathers killed in Vietnam to great-uncles two world wars away. One celebrant in the service, a chaplain, had used Bean’s own words about the Memorial: ‘this sacred place’. The chronicler and memorialist of the old AIF might have been moved most deeply not by words, nor by the solemn splendour of the funeral procession, but by the spontaneous placing of poppies, the Great War’s emblems of death and life, against those names.
— Ken Inglis, Sacred places: war memorials in the Australian landscape

Acknowledgement: The image above is from Unsplash and is by Shokufeh Pour-Reza.

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