Friday 11 November 2011

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.

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