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[christoll]

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

[shadowr]

ahhh yes, one o' me all time favorites.

[Uncle Cosmo]

Nice one, chris.

Ah, memories.  I wrote a 20-page paper on Jarrell's verse for a seminar at Hopkins (too long ago to admit to).  This is a justifiably renowned poem, but some of his other war poetry is pretty amazing too--I'm thinking "Eighth Air Force" ,"A Camp In The Prussian Forest"--or "Losses", whence the following:

We read our mail and counted up our missions--
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school--
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
...

All triumphs of the imagination--Jarrell was a flight instructor during The Big One, and (if I remember correctly) never left the States while in uniform.

One of these days I'll post "90 North", from before the war, which is the darkest bit of verse I have ever found myself inside...

[christoll]

Hi Joe, please do post 90 North - I would like to read it. We're living in wartime - someone is hiding an IED in a pile of trash, someone is putting on body armor, someone is sitting in a white house and eating steak off a china plate, someone is coming home in a bodybag - and the terror and the anger should be in our poems somewhere, maybe just as an uneasy undercurrent.