That's funny - the Mudcat serendipity/synnchronicity thing once again. I was just reading a poem about picking daisies, but in a rather different setting.

It's from an article by the Scottish folklorist, collector, singer, songwriter and academic, Hamish Hendersonwhich was included in a book "Alias MacAlias - writings on Songs Folk and Literature"published in 1992, which I rescued from a library book sale where it had been criminally included. It's out of print, typically.

The article is about soldiers in the Second World War who took to writing poetry as a way of dealing with their experiences, and it's an extract from a poem called Thermopylae 1941, by a man called John E.Brookes, who was a private in the Australian Infantry Force in Greece (before the war he'd worked his passage from Liverpool to Australia, landing with 2s6d. When the war started he walked from Broken Hill to Melbourne to enlist.)

The poem was stuffed with others in a cupboard under the stairs till he saw an advert in 1979 asking for poems written by soldiers, and he sent it to a man called Victor Selwyn putting an anthology together (which when published was called "From Oasis into Italy",(and that was my father's war too) which is also out of print.

Anyway, I'd just been looking at it, and reading this, when I opened the Mudcat and saw this thread. And I thought I'd like to post it here.

It's a long quote, but you won't be too likely to get a chance to see it elsewhere. And I think it's going to make me think about daisy-chains a different way from niow on. So here goes:

No purpose served consulting horoscopes
at Delphi; students of Herodatus
would know withdrawal to Thermopylae
and putting up barbed wire could only mean
fighting a rearguard action QED,
as Euclid would have put it. We had been
deposited into the warlike lap
of ancient deities. I said to Blue,
my Aussie mate, "There was this famous chap
Leonidas, he was the Spartan who
defended it with 300 men
against an army." Bluey took a draw
upon his cigarette. "Well stuff 'im then!"
a pungent comment on the art of war…

…I said "They wore
long hair, the Spartans, a visible proof
that they were free, not helots, and before
the battle they would gravely sit aloof
and garland it with flowers." Bluey spat.
Continuing to watch the empty road
across the plain, he took off his tin hat,
a proof that he was bald) and said "A load
of bloody pooftahs!" Thus he laid the ghost
of brave Leonidas…

And later, with our cigarettes concealed
behind cupped hands, we peered into the night
across the darkened plain and it revealed
first one and then another point of light,
and then a hundred of them, moving down
the distant backcloth, shining off and on
like tiny jewels sparkling on a crown
of moonlit mountains, a phenomenon
caused by the winding path of their descent
round hair-pin bends cascading from the heights
beyond Lamia, our first presentiment
of evil genius – they were the lights
of Hitler's war machines!…

"…Time to pick
the flowers, Blue, that bloom upon the steep
hillside," I said "make daisy chains and stick
the buggers in our hair!" He was asleep.