Riverhead High School art students have created 200 ceramic poppies for placement on the lawn of the Suffolk County Historical Society, near the World War I monument.
The art installation, by students of ceramics teacher Selena Pagliarulo and creative crafts teacher Debbie Cantalupo, will commemorate Memorial Day at the site of the monument on West Main Street, erected to honor the 304 Riverhead men who served in the U.S. military in World War I, including nine who did not return home.
Pagliarulo said the project was inspired by “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” a public art installation created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins in the moat of the Tower of London in 2014, to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. Each of the 888,246 ceramic red poppies in the installation represented the life of one British or Colonial serviceman killed in the war.
Poppies became a symbol of remembrance of World War I (July 28, 1914 – Nov. 11, 1918) because of “In Flanders Fields,” a poem written during the war by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian physician who wrote the poem in May 1915 after he conducted the funeral of a close friend killed in battle in Belgium. McCrae’s poem was first published that December in a British magazine. It became popular around the world. To the present time, veterans organizations sell remembrance poppies around Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
The daughter of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, Pagliarulo said she was so impressed by the Cummins installation and wanted to do something with her students “to give back and to honor people who have died fighting for our freedom.”
Altogether, 155 students participated in the project. Some students, who are on remote instruction during the pandemic, crafted them at home and brought them in to be fired in the kiln. Students were still working on the poppies last week in the ceramics classroom.
The ceramic poppies will be mounted on threaded metal rods and placed in the lawn near the monument on Thursday. They will be removed on June 1. Pagliarulo said she plans to store them until next year. She hopes to add to their numbers with another class of students next year, she said.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields, the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
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 fields.
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