A portable memorial to fallen soldiers blooms in Washington - PBS NewsHour
The Poppy Memorial arrived on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this weekend, commemorating all of the American service members who have died since World War I.
t’s 133-feet-long, containing 645,000 poppies, each representing an American service man or woman killed in combat since World War I.
In World War I, a Canadian officer visiting a comrade whom he had lost in a grave site saw poppies growing up among the crosses. He penned a poem, “In Flanders Field.” Three years later, an American woman, Moina Michael, wrote her own poem, “We Shall Keep the Faith.”
And in that, she said we should never forget the fallen. And she recommended wearing a poppy, as I’m doing. So, from that day forward, the poppy has been the symbol of the fallen.
The memorial is located here in a ideal location on the Mall, surrounded by the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean Memorial, the Lincoln, the World War II Memorial, so that Americans can see the connection between those memorials and 645,000 lives lost.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-portable-memorial-to-fallen-soldiers-blooms-in-washington
