Poppies Poem by gershon hepner

We drove off in our old jalopies
to fields where we assumed
we’d see the fields of golden poppies––
but they no longer bloomed.

Eschscholtzia is its given name,
it comes from California,
and flaunts a golden floral flame
for sunburned fauna, tawnier.

They’d vanished, all da oro copas,
there were no cups of gold,
and we, the tardy interlopers,
were hardly overbowled.

They’d suffered from the storms of spring,
the rain that helps had hindered,
and flash and flood had greater sting
than sleet and snow in winter.

When spring is cruel they cannot thrive
and lose their golden heads,
to cut short their brief springtime life
on poppy field death beds.

Their dead heads don’t say “Nevermore! ”
or rail against the thunder,
and next year they’ll return before
rains wash away the wonder.



The Newsletter of the Poppy Reserve/Mojave Desert, Volume 5, number 3, September 2007, has an article by Mary Wilson, “California Poppy: How It Got Its Genus Name.” In 1815 the ex-Chancellor of Russia sent an expedition in search of a waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The exploring ship was called the “Rurik” and was under the command of Otto von Kotzebue. One of the explorers on board was Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) . He was the author of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. In 1805 he accompanied his regiment to Hameln, where he shared in the humiliation of its treasonable humiliation. Placed on parole, he went to Paris, where he was drawn into the circle of Madame de Stael, whom he followed into exile in Switzerland. In 1815 he was appointed to the Russian ship “Rurik”. During this trip he described a number of new species, including the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica. The name was a tribute to the ship’s Baltic German entomologist and surgeon, Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz (1793-1831) , the ship surgeon from 1815-1818. The name of the poppy may be spelled with a “t, ” as in Eschscholtz’s name, but Chamisso omitted the “t” when naming the species, so that Eschscholzia is the correct name according to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

When Chamisso was 48 he returned to literature and wrote “Frauenliebe und Leben” (1830) , which Schumann set to music.


3/27/97