In my childhood I was bound, almost with passion, to the poppies that opened shy and slow in the meadow behind our house. Like nothing around them, delicate and every bit as strong, fading the moment they are touched, these beauties warm me still. Every living thing on the small blue planet is a miracle. And the only living thing unaware of this miracle, I think, is humankind, master of the planet.
Today is the anniversary of the Çanakkale "Victory" of 18 March. It is a day for remembering thousands of people, their number reaching into the millions: those who died fighting to defend their own land, and those who stood against them and shed their blood through who knows what banal cause, what accident.
Humankind does not want to accept that the lives which went were in vain. Yet my heart keeps its distance from any sentence that would glorify war. For while the tiniest poppy is pregnant with so much miracle, my heart will not consent to any life raised on its mother's milk, a life that had likely loved and been loved, being lost for rules, borders and obsessions whose sanctity we confer on ourselves. I hope the lives we lost, made of stardust, join life again this spring in the bud of a flower. My heedless soul believes in being mixed back into life, far more than in epics of heroism.