Strange Fruit
Seamus Heaney * Track #6 On North
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Album North
- #1Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication to Mary Heaney: Sunlight
Seamus Heaney
- #2Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication to Mary Heaney 2. The Seed Cutters
Seamus Heaney
- #3Antaeus
Seamus Heaney
- #4The Grauballe Man
Seamus Heaney
- #5Punishment
Seamus Heaney
- #6Strange Fruit
Seamus Heaney
- #7Act of Union
Seamus Heaney
- #8Hercules and Antaeus
Seamus Heaney
- #9North
Seamus Heaney
Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
Performed by
Seamus HeaneyAbout
“Strange Fruit” is one of two poems written by Heaney upon seeing in a museum corpses exhumed from the Arrhus boglands in Denmark. The other The Tollund Man is a more masculine commentary on the permanence of cruelty in society.
Seamus Heaney was clearly disturbed by the violence of the deaths of b...
Strange Fruit Annotated
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.