The Bog Body

The giving bog sweats in silence
A thin breath rising

Beneath the heather and bog-cotton
Under sphagnum’s hunger
Something waits
Ripe with remembering

The bog does not forget
It only swallows

They pulled him from this hunger

A man curled like a question
Skin tanned by the centuries
His bones digested as the keep.
A king, they said,
Sacrificed where old borders ran
Where territories once kissed.

When the land failed
When people starved
It was not the poor who paid

The king, bound in marriage to the territory
Suffered the shame
His broken vow salted the fields
So his blood must quench
The bog’s hunger

Now the bog lies torn and famished
It’s flesh open in wounds
Hagged and hollowed
Gashed by a greedy hand
The curlew no longer calls

The hunger is deep now
A silence fed with forgetting

Those who pay these wound’s price -
Out of mind and out of heart
Willingly sacrificed

Now he who tore the bog’s skin
Is paid to sew it shut

No weight on his shoulder
Nor blood on his hands

This territories hunger runs
Deeper now
No blight in the bracken strewn fields
But an emptiness, a longing
And a famine of the spirit
Seeping through
The bog’s dry veins

They pulled the king from in this peat
The price of a broken world
And now they pay the woundmaker
To patch the silence shut