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"Bog Queen"
I lay waiting between turf-face and demesne wall, between heatherly 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.
—Seamus Heaney
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