Strange Fruit
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.
Comments (1)
nomeaku@... said
at 10:20 pm on Nov 13, 2008
The description in this poem is reminiscent of a novel I read entitled The Things They Carried. The novel was about the Vietnam War and the things the soldiers carried physically and psychologically. There was a section where the author depicts the death of a soldier. The way he describes the image of the man blowing up made it seem like a beautiful and marvelous sight to behold, even though it is actually a gruesome scene.
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