Poet’s Showcase
"Loquacious Soldier" by John Clifford
Loquacious Soldier
By John Clifford
They should never have drafted
his tongue into the army.
We others left our civil selves behind,
muffled our home-hearts with
wads of soldier profanity. Nowhere
could he escape. He said:
“Amplify the sound of land crabs
and I hear a flat john boat scraping
the shore of a gravel-bed stream.”
Civilian-soldiers grew schizoid
when he talked in the jungle night.
“You’re driving on a hot day
in a car of oven-metal. Then the rain
comes rolling down the highway,
pushing that first cool draught of air,
and it has that wet-asphalt smell
cold water brings out of hot pavement.”
He bought his packet yesterday-
zapped, they said, in mid-sentence.
A few may have sighed relief.
Not I – though he had affected me.
Lying on the swampy ground, I line
my rifle-sights on a thin figure
crawling by a rice field. My senses
should be focused on his death,
but my memory plays tricks
and I hear that silenced voice:
“As a child I killed a tree
in a neighbor’s woods.
And I never see it, white
among the old ones dark and living,
that I am not reproached.”