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.
Strange Fruit - meaning Summary
Bog Body as Relic
The poem describes the severed head of a girl preserved in a bog and displayed as an archaeological find. Heaney lingers on her appearance, linking the body’s physical decay with the strange respect people may feel toward old remains. The poem turns a murdered, nameless victim into a disturbing relic, stressing both the violence done to her and the uneasy fascination her survival creates.
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