Small courtyard in Flanders — Albert Baertsoen (1866–1922) — public domain
walking these narrow streets of cobblestone testimony I should feel home again even though their guttural speech now sounds alien like a bevy of gaggling geese still these are my people prosperous stubborn proud and tidy their traditions and virtues huddled tightly around a church-steepled horizon of smalltown mentalities beyond which they fail to see the blinders on the draft horse clear and prominent as it ploughs the only field it knows and scents and fears the travelled stranger I have become