David Harsent - Chinese Whispers

They told us about a boy who disappeared
when the convoy went through. Search
as they might there was no sign until word
was sent of ‘residue’ between the wheel and the wheel-arch.

*

News arrived of the woman who went mad,
who kicked-in the windows of every billet,
who ran shrieking through the Street of Locks, who shed
their semmits and stays to dance a carcan in the market.

*

This one’s got legs: the man who went down to the river
under fire, searching among that day’s dead for his only brother,
turning the bodies, one by one, to discover
his wife, son, uncles, sister, father, mother.

*

The Surgeon General, they say it was, who went back
to drink the last of his Roffignac, to sit in a dry bath
and open a vein: a man, for sure, on the right track.
One for the road. One for the primrose path.

*

Hardly a day goes by but someone boasts
of having been there when those men downed weapons
with hardly a word, and walked through their own lines,
later reported as slips of the tongue, or ghosts.

*

How’s this for a tale of slaughter:
a man who slew his herd, then drew a hood
over the trembling head of each blonde daughter
and shot them where they stood?

*

Word of mouth has a gut-shot man walk all of ten
miles from the front to his own front-door, lift the latch,
find them dead, dig seven graves, fire the thatch,
fill his bottle, sling his gun, walk back again.

*

Here’s one about the raw recruit who crawled out from beneath
the corpses of his comrades, like a dinner guest
emerging from a bun-fight scrum, to charge the machine-gun nest
armed with only a shovel, with only a trowel, with only a toothpick, with only his teeth.

David Harsent

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/chinese-whispers-3/