“The first British poppy crop was destroyed by hares. In the 19th Century, British horticulturalists who were incentivised by the booming opium trade attempted to establish an opium poppy crop in the UK. Unfortunately for them, it was eaten by a plague of hares.” — BBC UK
We might have told them, if they’d asked,
the poppies wouldn’t make it to their melancholy
island, no matter how swift their sails snapped
across the sea. Then again, we love our land more
than they love theirs; we long to return, not flee.
That’s why you don’t see us boarding clippers
to claim to ground not ours. With our bountiful
fertile crescent, who needs more plenty?
But there’s money to be made & they think
us desert people too simple, too primitive,
too savage to notice—so why not extract
what they deem we waste? Make bales
& bank draining the stems of soporific milk.
The comatose & dead sleep better than
they do with their fattened purses weighing
burdensome on their shopkeep belts.
Some say nature is amoral, a passive observer
of human follies, but we know better. Even
the rabbits, cousins to our amber-eyed
cape hares, know theft when they see it.
They snatch for themselves what was plucked
from us; harvest their fare in twin incisors.
The Brits called them a rodent plague,
ignoring the pestilence in the mirror.
Colonizers don’t see beauty unless it suits them,
only use in pounds sterling & pence. & when
the poppies sprang to their fields of fallen
soldiers—because the earth never forgets—
they saw not penance or revenge in the flags
of stems like goblets of blood, but remembrance.
& for a war they started with their manifest
destiny, their imperative toward the imperial.
We could have told them there’s no use
picking poppies for a field of graves—
they’ll wither by the time the corpse chills.
But that’s an occupier for you: only
seeing value in a thing uprooted, removed,
then mythologizing it as a natural occurrence.
But no one ever asks why Britain’s
flower of war is not native to its shores.
We remember, too: decades of mandate; thirty
years when we didn’t belong to ourselves.
We knew it was only a matter of time
before they displaced us, too—they did
it to the poppies first, flinging the flowers
overboard the merchant ships, cursing them
to the salt ocean until they learned to sear
the stems, encasing the liquid sap in seal.
They kept us under boot & thumb,
under guard & gun, until they found
a way to extract us for motive also.
Habibis, I beg you: gather like the hares
in the flowered fields, gnaw & gnash
your teeth at power, dig your claws
into the cogs of empire. Collect
your small animal might
Added: Friday, August 30, 2024 / Used with permission.
Photo by Kateri Ang & Gabe Rosenberg.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They are the winner of the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released from the Belt imprint of Arcadia Publishing in 2024. Read more at Mandy's website.
Image Description: A black-and-white photo of Mandy Shunnarah, a nonbinary person with short brown hair, wearing a green blazer, a cream-colored shirt with vertical stripes, and blue jeans. They are sitting with their elbows on their knees and smiling.
