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.

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