As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

The Conscript

Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,

The doctors sit in the glare of electric light

Watching the endless stream of naked white

Bodies of men for whom their hasty award

Means life or death maybe, or the living death

Of mangled limbs, blind eyes, or a darkened brain;

And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,

Pronounces each doom with easy indifferent breath.

Then suddenly I shudder as I see

A young man stand before them wearily,

Cadaverous as one already dead;

But still they stare untroubled as he stands

With arms outstretched and drooping thorn-crowned head,

The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.