Seamus Heaney

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Vandaag uit een bundel uit mijn boekenkast ‘Opened ground, poems 1966-1996’ van Seamus Heaney het gedicht ‘Strange fruit’.

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Strange fruit

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Here is the girl’s head like an enhumed 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 noseis dark as a turf clod,

het eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.

Diodorus Sicilus confessed

his gradual ease among the likes of this:

Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

beheaded girl, outstaring axe

and beautification, oustaring

what had begun to feel like reverence

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01 Jul 2010 — Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and writer Seamus Heaney in The Linen Hall Library, Belfast, N.Ireland | Location: Belfast, N’Ireland. — Image by © Geray Sweeney/Corbis