A poem by the Flemish writer Hugo Claus

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

Here the soil is most rank.

Even after all these years without dung

you would be able to raise a death leek here

to take on all markets.

The English veterans are getting scarce.

Every year they point to their yet scarcer friends:

Hill Sixty, Hill Sixty One, Poelkapelle.

In Flanders Fields the threshers

draw ever-decreasing circles round the twisting trenches

of hardened sandbags, the entrails of death.

The local butter

tastes of poppies.