The “P” coloring today is for Poppies. I colored it for poppies.

The Dream of the Blue Turtles is the first solo album by English musician Sting, released in the United States on 1 June 1985. The album reached number three on the UK Albums Chart. It reached number two on the Billboard 200.

In the US the album spawned four singles, “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”, “Fortress Around Your Heart”, “Russians” and “Love Is the Seventh Wave”. The album earned Grammy nominations for Album of the Year, Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Best Jazz Instrumental Performance and Best Engineered Recording.

The album is named after a dream of Sting’s:
The title of the album came from a dream that woke me up on my first night in Barbados. I dreamed I was sitting in the walled garden behind my house in Hampstead, under a lilac tree on a well manicured lawn, surrounded by beautiful rosebushes. Suddenly the bricks from the wall exploded into the garden and I turned to see the head of an enormous turtle emerging from the darkness, followed by four or five others. They were not only the size of a man, they were also blue and had an air of being immensely cool, like hepcats, insouciant and fearless. They didn’t harm me but with an almost casual violence commenced to destroy my genteel English garden, digging up the lawn with their claws, chomping at the rosebushes, bulldozing the lilac tree. Total mayhem. I woke up to the sound of Branford in the room upstairs, riffing wildly on his tenor sax, followed by his unmistakeable laughter.

“Children’s Crusade,” parallels the destruction of the younger generation in World War I to the devastation brought about by heroin addiction in modern-day London. Although “Children’s Crusade” is about those who died in World War I and drug addiction in modern-day London, I see this song as encompassing a much wider scope. I dedicate this song on Memorial Day (in the US) to honor every soldier who has died under the commands of “corpulent generals, safe behind lines.” I dedicate it to every veteran (now dead or still alive) of a war who has ever turned to mind-altering substances to try to forget what happened while there. I dedicate this song as a prayer to END ALL WAR.

https://youtu.be/R6pQ8qKg-Ag

Young men, soldiers, nineteen fourteen
Marching through countries they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a children’s crusade
Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation
Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History’s lessons drowned in red wine
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade
The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation
Midnight in Soho nineteen eighty four
Fixing in doorways, opium slaves
Poppies for young men, such bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade

Songwriters: Gordon Sumner