Birmingham VA Health Care System The Poppy Project
More than 60 employees, now proclaimed artists, participated in a Memorial Day tribute honoring military Veterans for their sacrifice. Over the past several weeks, these artists displayed their style with color, creating colorful masterpieces with the stroke of a brush on a card-sized canvas.
The venture was a color wheel of fun and a creative employee gesture to honor Veterans on Memorial Day. Supplies and materials were provided, and employees painted poppies on cards for Veterans, families, and caregivers. The assignment became known as “The Poppy Project.”
In the United States, Americans wear the symbolic red flower on Memorial Day—the last Monday in May—to commemorate the sacrifice of many men and women who have given their lives fighting for their country. The story of the poppy dates back to World War I and is creatively described in a poem titled, In Flanders Fields. A copy of the poem was inserted inside each carefully crafted card.
The cards will be shared with families over the Memorial Day weekend.
The artwork is on display at the main facility in Birmingham. All the designs may be viewed in this video link The Poppy Project.
Story of the Poppy
From 1914 to 1918, World War I took a greater human toll than any previous conflict. The Great War, as it was then known, also ravaged the landscape of Western Europe, where most of the fiercest fighting took place. From the devastated landscape of the battlefields, the red poppy would grow and, thanks to a famous poem, become a powerful symbol of remembrance.
Across northern France and Flanders (northern Belgium), the brutal clashes between Allied and Central Powers soldiers destroyed fields and forests, ripping up trees and plants and wreaking havoc on the soil beneath. But in the warm early spring of 1915, bright red flowers began peeking through the battle-scarred land.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of poppies that spring, shortly after the Second Battle of Ypres. McCrae tended to the wounded and got a firsthand look at the carnage of that clash, in which the Germans unleashed lethal chlorine gas for the first time in the war.
Struck by the sight of bright red blooms on broken ground, McCrae wrote a poem, “In Flanders Fields,” in which he channeled the voice of the fallen soldiers buried under those hardy poppies. The poem would become one of the most famous works of art to emerge from the Great War.
Today, nearly a century after World War I ended, millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
In the United States, Americans don’t typically wear poppies on November 11 (Veterans Day), which honors all living veterans. Instead, they wear the symbolic red flower on Memorial Day—the last Monday in May—to commemorate the sacrifice of so many men and women who have given their lives fighting for their country.