Contact

I've been a bit quiet over the past few days - primarily due to a writing deadline that I need to hit. (Who says academics have the summer off!) While today would look like an ideal day to get some blogging done, instead I'm just going to kick back and celebrate my birthday with family.

And as in inverse birthday gift, I give you this poem by the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. It's called "Strange Fruit" and is one of a series of poems that Heaney has written about bog bodies, corpses mummified in peaty soil.

Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

For more of Heaney's poems, including Tollund Man which also deals with a "bog body", see here.