Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

Clarissa Businesses:

On November 19, 1918, just before the Armistice, Moina Michael was on duty at the annual YMCA Overseas Conference. A little bored while sitting in the room where the service members said their goodbyes to family members and loved ones, a soldier gave Moina a copy of a magazine. In the magazine was a dog-eared page with the poem “We Shall Not Sleep” by Col. John McCrae, M.D. The poem was later renamed to “In Flanders Field.”

The poem was written for a fellow soldier for whom McCrae had performed a burial service. In it, the author notes the presence of blooming red poppies among the rows of white crosses on the deserted battlefield of western Belgium and northern France.

Moina was particularly struck by the last stanza:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch be yours to hold it high,

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 

In Flanders Field.

On the back of an envelope, Moina quickly wrote out her response to McCrae’s verse, her own poem entitled, “We Shall Keep the Faith.”

The last stanza captures her idea to wear a poppy in honor of the war dead.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red

We wear in honor of our dead,

Fear not that ye have died for naught;

We’ll teach the lesson that we wrought

In Flanders Fields.

Moina declared, “I shall buy red poppies . . .I shall always wear red poppies.”

“The Flower of Remembrance” will be distributed in Clarissa on Friday, May 10 by American Legion Auxiliary members. Your donation to the Poppy Program would be greatly appreciated.

Programs that we donated to last year were: Armed Forces Service Center; Wreath of the Fallen; Fischer House; Legionville; Child Welfare Fund; and the Brain Science Foundation.

Please send your donations to the American Legion Auxiliary Unit 213, Clarissa. 

Thank you.

Barb Petersen

American Legion Auxiliary Unit 213

P.O. Box 221, Clarissa, MN 56440