Seventeen syllables leave little room, and Thomas W. Morris spends his first line on a sentence that refuses to finish. "Poppies buried with," it begins, and stops at a comma, the preposition left dangling with nothing to hold. We have to carry "with" across the line break to find out what the poppies are buried with: "The deceased we remember." Even then the grammar wobbles. Read one way, the flowers lie alongside the dead whom we remember. Read another, the comma lets "The deceased" stand apart, almost as an object of its own: *we remember the deceased*. Remembering becomes the act the poem performs, not just something it describes. The syntax sounds like speech that falters, as if the speaker cannot quite say it straight.
The poppy is the poem's one concrete image, and it carries a great deal. Poppies are widely used as a symbol of remembrance for those killed in war, and judging by the imagery, that is the world the poem moves in, though it never names a particular war. It also never says the poppies are red. Readers supply that themselves. The only colour the poem actually names is white, and it names it only to take it away: "No white flags remain." That is the poem's central puzzle and its strongest effect.
A white flag signals surrender or truce, so its absence can be read in at least two ways. It might mean that nobody gave in, and the dead are remembered as people who held out to the end. It might mean that no sign of peace is left, that the possibility of stopping has been used up. A third reading is quieter: whatever offered a way out has been buried too. The poem does not choose between these. The reader has to decide whether the last line is pride or grief, or both at once.
The form adds to this. The lines run five, seven and five syllables, the shape of a haiku, and the poem doesn't rhyme. That restraint suits the subject, because rhyme would bring a neatness the poem doesn't want. Instead it relies on sound echoes. Look at the small, soft *w* sounds that run through it: "with," "we," "white." They tie the poem's three ideas together, the burial, the community that remembers, and the flags that are gone. A closer echo links "remember" to "remain." One word opens the second line and the other closes the poem, and they share a root sound and nearly a meaning, since to remember is to keep something from vanishing. "Remain" also brushes against "remains," the word we use for what is left of the dead.
The word choices repay attention too. "Deceased" is a formal, almost official word, the language of notices and ceremonies, and it keeps a respectful distance. "Buried" is blunt and physical and pulls the other way. Between them the poem holds ceremony and the grave together without comment.
The rhythm tells the same story. Line one ends on "with," a weak word that cannot bear any weight, so the poem starts off balanced on nothing. Line three is the opposite. "No white flags remain" is made of heavy, mostly one-syllable words, and speaking it you naturally put weight on almost every beat: *no WHITE FLAGS reMAIN*. After the hesitation of the opening, the ending falls like a door closing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of the reader in so small a space. Morris gives us a flower, a burial, a plural "we," and an absence, and leaves us to complete the sentence that line one abandons. That is a fitting way to write about remembrance, which is also something we do by filling in what is missing. The poem doesn't claim to know what the dead would have wanted, and that honest uncertainty is part of why its three lines linger after the page is turned.