I stopped to read a familiar poem displayed in large type on a poster in a shop window on Germantown Avenue:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

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…

It was mid-October, and the shop was housing a temporary exhibition of photographs of poppies. Inside, I found the poppies in the photos weren’t flowers: They were sculptures of the red paper poppies we associate with Veterans Day — Armistice Day. The poppies were enormous, 10 feet tall, with petals of aluminum sheetrock, and yet engineered with such refinement that they moved on their stems with the wind, like the poppies in the poem — 300 of them!

The gallerist, Jo Ann Miles Miller, told me the photos were an archive of the work of her late husband, Gary G. Miller, called “Papaver Rubrum Giganteum,” installed in the gardens of the Morris Arboretum in 2008. Other than a few of the large blossoms, the originals no longer exist. In keeping with Gary Miller’s philosophy, they were recycled in 2009 as an exhibition created by students at the Greenwoods School, and installed on the grounds of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.

He’d been moved by the poppies, their symbolism of mourning for the Great War, “the war to end all wars,” and by the poem as well:

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields…

Last summer, the Morris installed reproductions of the original sculptures for two months — “towering,” they called them, “surreal, vibrant.” I was sorry I missed the exhibit, but even the photos and the concept awed me.

I told Jo Ann about my own work. I’d written a novel whose two young heroes serve in the British army in the Great War, one of them in Gallipoli, the other on the Western Front in France near Flanders. His name is Alec. At the very moment of the armistice, at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, Alec witnesses the death of a brother-in-arms by his side in the trenches. In my research, I learned that soldiers kept dying and killing in a kind of frenzy after peace was declared. I call that part of the novel, “Eleventh Day, Month, Hour.” I offered to hold a reading from my work in the gallery among the photos, to mourn and honor the dead, as Jo Ann’s husband had, but her exhibition was to close in a couple of days, and we wouldn’t have time to pull it together.

I talked to a neighbor across the street, Debra Gress, at her bookstore, called booked. She wanted to participate; she volunteered to host a reading from my novel, “Alec,” along with a display of some of the photos of Gary Miller’s work on Nov. 11 to mark Veterans Day.

Poppies. Last year, I visited the Normandy American Cemetery in France, sacred to those who died in the war that caused the Great War to be renamed World War I. They gave us paper poppies there. At home, I tucked them into the pages of “Alec.”

…If ye break the faith with us who die,

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

in Flanders fields.

William di Canzio is a Chestnut Hill resident and his novel, “Alec,” was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review.