Here's one last Hecht poem before his visit this weekend. He explains in a note that it was common knowledge in the middle ages that the Mandrake sprouted from the semen of hanged men, that witches made love potions of it, that its shriek when pulled from the ground could drive one insane.
The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn
Mysteriously fed by the dying breath
Of felons, by the foul odor that melts
Down from their bodies hanging on the gallows,
The rank, limp fesh, the soft pendulous guilt,
This solitary plant takes root at night,
Its tiny charnel blossoms the pale blue
Of Pluto's ice pavilions; being dried,
Powdered and mixed with the cold morning dew
From the left hand of an executed man,
It confers untroubled sleep, and can prevent
Prenatal malformations if applied
To a woman's swelling body, except in Lent.
Take care to clip only the little blossoms,
For the plant, uprooted, utters a cry of pain
So highly pitched as both to break the eardrum
And render the would-be harvester insane.
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