Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. <br />Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. <br /> <br />They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair <br />And made an exhibition of its coil, <br />Let the air at her leathery beauty. <br />Pash of tallow, perishable treasure: <br />Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod, <br />Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings. <br />Diodorus Siculus confessed <br />His gradual ease with the likes of this: <br />Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible <br />Beheaded girl, outstaring axe <br />And beatification, outstaring <br />What had begun to feel like reverence.<br /><br />Seamus Heaney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/strange-fruit-4/
