The poet T. van Deel was fascinated by me. He drew me hundreds of times in his final years, and also gave my name to his last collection of poems. It included the poem ‘Herfsttijloos II’. It goes like this:

Born from its flaking bulb the stem rises steady and straight, white at first and later at the flower tending to the purple of All Souls’ Day.

Their bulbs become exhausted and seem even older than they were but the bloom is boundless as if a nest full of birds were holding their beaks lifewide open loud and irrepressible