Sacrificing Innocence

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I grew up as a scapegoat. I was the one who wasn't involved and the one to blame at the same time. I was the easy target as a child—too quiet to speak up and too shy to fight back. I grew up as that tired girl who was never big enough to fight her battles. She would stand patiently while the older kids berated her and tore at her confidence until she would politely knot her hands together behind her back and stare mutely at the ground.

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

I was always the one to blame and the one to pick on. I had grown so accustomed to it that I no longer reacted. At night I would climb up on the roof of my family’s home and sit with my back against the slanted shingles. The stars would welcome me in and I would always smile back. I don’t know where I found the courage to smile. Eventually, I found my voice again and I raised it loud enough to stir the bones of society. That journey is why when I read "Punishment" by Seamus Heaney, I felt an odd bond to the broken woman who was dug out from a bog.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

The poem describes one of the “bog people”—cadavers that were found buried in bogs after thousands of years. Heaney doesn’t know who the woman was or her crime but he still attempts to paint a vivid picture of her. She is led to the edge of the bog with a rope tied around her neck. The cold of the wind makes a long shudder pass through her thin body. As the readers, we are shown her undernourished condition and we pause to wonder who she could have been. Her skin is pale in the frigid air. She is then forced into the mud.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

The repetition of vowels in this stanza offers a lyrical flow to the words. It feels as if Heaney is trying to give special tribute to her death scene. She was thrown as a scapegoat into the black depths of the bogs. Then she lay buried in the suffocating mud for thousands of years until some archeologist drug her frail body from out of the bog. For all those years she was smothered in silence. In a way, this scene of the bog woman is frightening. The woman’s preserved body now immortalizes her society’s form of punishment.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

She was once a sapling—new and fresh in life. She was innocent. Now she is “barked” meaning the removal of bark from a tree which then kills it. Even though she has been silenced, Heaney still shows us her strength by describing her as “oak-bone”.

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

She becomes invisible in the bog. Her body soaks in the acid of the mud and blackens with the lack of oxygen. But what for? She had to be punished for what she did.  I can’t help but project her situation into the present day. I wonder what will happen to me as I choose to be the minority and stand up for my beliefs. Will the people around me tie the “halter at the nape of [my] neck” and smother my words? Using the word halter in the poem implies an interesting interpretation. “Halter” implies a type of rope to lead and control a horse. By using “halter”, Heaney shows how the woman is forced and controlled as she is led to her death.

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

Heaney weaves a tone of mystery and awe through his poem. He never gives the woman a name. Who is this she? She could be any of us. She is malnourished with the lack of a loving word, head shaved as preparation for her execution, and blindfolded from the truth. He guesses at her crime and claims her to be an adulteress.

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

She was once beautiful and young with the “flaxen-hair” common to the region where her body was found. She was killed as a “scapegoat” which implies that she was blamed for the mistakes of the people who sent her to death. Even though Heaney guessed at her crime as an adulteress, he claims that she was innocent and instead was killed because of the capture’s guilt for their own sins. Heaney affirms her guiltlessness.

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

In the stanza above, Heaney explains that pitfall of society. We live in such a bandwagon culture that even those who would have thought the girl to be innocent still throw the “stones of silence”. Heaney implies that if he saw her death he would have done nothing to stop it.

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

There is no honor is this type of death. She was shamed at the hands of those who loved her. But don’t we each do this? I know the many times when I have smiled and tilted my head to one side to show omission. I converse sweetly and remark on the beautiful weather but behind the smile brews the storm that threatens to throw the stones of silence.

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

We all would have “stood dumb” for fear of the firing squad turning on us next. We are self-preserving rather than self-sacrificing. Pride whitens our teeth and selfishness fills our bellies.

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Once while driving, I passed a homeless man sitting by a chain-link fence just before the highway. The wrinkles set so deeply in his face that they seemed to be carved in with a knife. The sadness that pooled around his eyes sunk was devastating but all I could do was grip the steering wheel tighter. Voices inside me begged for me to think, he did it to himself he must deserve what he got. After five minutes I turned the car around and gave the man the last five dollars I had in my wallet. We sat and hugged and said God-bless-yous until I knew I needed to leave. I understood how strange I would have looked sitting next to the old man. For that moment, I didn’t care. For that moment, I didn’t tug at the rope around someone else’s neck. For that moment, I didn’t make the man into a scapegoat for his own condition.

There never has to be a scapegoat for the innocent.

Moments like that show me how to recover from the times the halter has been tied around my neck. I’ve easily come to know that life will try to silence me when my opinion is a minority. But rather than being smothered in the suffocating bog, I stand up. Through my years of being the scapegoat, I’ve learned that society isn’t always right. The homeless man on the side of the road didn’t use the money to go buy drugs like the popular opinions would say. I stopped believing in the popular opinion. I don’t want to be dragged down by the “weighing stone” of traditional ideas. I am not the drowned girl who Seamus Heaney so fondly memorialized in his poem and I have never fallen within the bell curve of normality.

I will be the only thing I know how to be. I will be unapologetically me.