clichetothemax

I have something to share.

This will not be nearly as light-heartedly entertaining as yesterday's nonsense. But, much better.
Seamus Heaney, Irish poet/writer/etc, wrote this as part of his series of 'bog people' poems. I could say a million things about it, but Heaney says all these things far better than I, so I will leave it to him. It is a rather poignant and particularly compelling picture of past cruelty blurring with the present (all those 'p's were actually unintentional, but I enjoy them, so I'm leaving it). The following paragraph is the footnote for "Punishment", as found in my Norton Anthology. It helps with some of the references made in the poem. You should really read that poem.

'In 1951 the peat-stained body of a young girl, who lived in the late 1st century CE, was recovered from a bog in Windeby, Germany. As P. V. Glob describes her in The Bog People, she "lay naked in the hole in the peat, a bandage over the eyes and a collar around the neck. The band across the eyes was drawn tight and had cut into the neck and the base of the nose. We may feel sure that it had been used to close her eyes to this world. There was no mark of strangulation on the neck, so that it had not been used for that purpose." Her hair "had been shaved off with a razor on the left side or the head.When the brain was removes the convolutions and folds could clearly be seen.This girl of only fourteen had had an inadequate winter diet.to keep the young body under, some birch branches and a big stone were laid upon her." According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the Germanic peoples punished adulterous women by shaving off their hair and then scourging them out of the village or killing them. More recently, her "betraying sisters" were sometimes shaved, stripped, tarred, and handcuffed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to the railings of Belfast in punishment for keeping company with British soldiers.'


Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.