I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.
My body was braille
for the creeping influences:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled at my feet,
through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots
pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting
on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground
dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.
My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.
My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts’
soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs—
the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.
My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.
Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter’s spade
who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
between the stone jambs
at my head and my feet.
Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut
and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
Here’s Seamus Heaney, first talking about his poems on the bog bodies of Iron Age Europe, in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, and then the bog poems themselves, spanning three of his collection…
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