The Grauballe Man
As if he had been
poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of
himself.
The grain of his
wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the
ridge
and purse of a
mussel,
his spine an eel
arrested
under a glisten of
mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat
that has tanned and
toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a
dark
elderberry place.
Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?
And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I first saw his
twisted face
in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a
forceps baby,
but now he lies
perfected in my
memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and
atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly
compassed
on his shield,
with the actual
weight
of each hooded
victim,
slashed and dumped.
Source of the text – Seamus Heaney, North. London: Faber and
Faber, 1975, p. 28-29.
TJB: Left a goodlooking corpse. After a great 1st sentence,
the poem posits a bog full of gorgeous tragic bodies as a metaphor for the
Troubles.
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