A poem by the Flemish poet Hugo Claus

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

Here the soil is most rank.

Even after all these years without dung

you could raise a prize death leek here.

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 smaller circles round the twisting trenches

of hardened sandbags, the entrails of death.

The local butter

tastes of poppies.