"Poppies" focuses on the emotions of those left behind when ordinary people are called to fight wars, and particularly narrates a mother's response to sending her child off to battle. Although she mourns for herself and for the safety of childhood that has passed, she puts on a brave face as she smooths her (presumed, based on context clues) son's collar and collects cat hairs from his uniform. There is grief in these actions as the mother understands that she may never see her child alive again. After she escorts her child to the door in perhaps a final goodbye, she returns to a happier time in her mind, longing to hear the simplicity of her child's "playground voice catching on the wind."

This mother watches her child leave three days before Armistice Day, a day to remember veterans of war which began at the conclusion of World War I. This war was cataclysmic to human life everywhere, and the implied association of a day of remembrance is that there is inherent death in such conflicts. Not all those who fight wars will return home—not in World War I and not in the wars fought in our modern society.

The speaker of this poem is not particularly anti-war or anti-government. Instead, she navigates war as the death of childhood and of a mother's protection over her children and mourns for simpler times when she could graze her own nose against the tip of her child's, longing for the serenity that such easy times brought her.