The wind is still fresh, the steppe is waking with reluctance, and she is already on stage. Scarlet as the dawn. Heroic as a first impulse. Amid the grey-green yarn of the grasses, a brushstroke of live fire.
She might have stepped straight out of the score of Glière’s Red Poppy—the 1927 ballet that took this very flower for its title and its heroine. Not sleep, then, but a dance: an assertion of light and colour.
And that is worth dwelling on, because sleep is precisely what the poppy is famous for everywhere else. It is the flower of Morpheus and of opium, of the field that puts Dorothy to sleep on the way to Oz, of Lethe and of drowsy classical verse. And since 1918 it has carried a second freight, heavier still: in Flanders the poppies grew over the dead, and the West has worn them every November since.
The Armenian Highland, one might think, has grounds enough of its own for the mournful reading.
Yet the local language declines it. In Turkish the poppy is gelincik—the diminutive of gelin, ‘bride.’ A little bride. Not a narcotic, not a wreath: a girl in red at a wedding. (The same word, incidentally, also means a weasel, which suggests the language was in a generous mood and handed the title to whatever struck it as small and quick and dressed for the occasion.)
Armenian, for its part, calls it kakach — a word that sounds like a small cheerful noise and means nothing more solemn than the flower itself.
So the poppy of the highland is not sleeping, and is not mourning. She is dancing—proudly, at speed, with the morning wind in her petals. Elsewhere she may stand for slumber; here, at this altitude, she is rather more like a signal to wake up. A scarlet gesture. A chord struck by the spirit.
The little bride is up before anyone else, and dressed for it.
