Abstrakt Xxcellence Studios/Pexels

• A Sick Child
• The postman comes when I am still in bed. 
• “Postman, what do you have for me today?” 
• I say to him. (But really I’m in bed.) 
• Then he says - what shall I have him say?

• “This letter says that you are president 
• Of - this word here; it’s a republic.” 
• Tell them I can’t answer right away. 
• “It’s your duty.” No, I’d rather just be sick.

• Then he tells me there are letters saying everything 
• That I can think of that I want for them to say. 
• I say, “Well, thank you very much. Good-bye.” 
• He is ashamed, and turns and walks away. 

• If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want. 
• I want . . . I want a ship from some near star 
• To land in the yard, and beings to come out 
• And think to me: “So this is where you are! 

• Come.” Except that they won’t do, 
• I thought of them. . . . And yet somewhere there must be 
• Something that’s different from everything. 
• All that I’ve never thought of - think of me!

• Mail Call
• The letters always just evade the hand 
• One skates like a stone into a beam, falls like a bird. 
• Surely the past from which the letters rise 
• Is waiting in the future, past the graves? 
• The soldiers are all haunted by their lives. 
• Their claims upon their kind are paid in paper 
• That established a presence, like a smell. 
• In letters and in dreams they see the world. 
• They are waiting: and the years contract 
• To an empty hand, to one unuttered sound— 
• The soldier simply wishes for his name.

• Gunner
• Did they send me away from my cat and my wife 
• To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth, 
• To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent? 
• Did I nod in the flies of the schools? 
• And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits, 
• The blood froze over my splints like a scab— 
• Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret, 
• Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death? 
• And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave, 
• All my wars over? How easy it was to die! 
• Has my wife a pension of so many mice? 
• Did the medals go home to my cat?

• Eighth Air Force
• If, in an odd angle of the hutment, 
• A puppy laps the water from a can 
• Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving 
• Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man 
• Is not as men have said: a wolf to man? 

• The other murderers troop in yawning; 
• Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one 
• Lies counting missions, lies there sweating 
• Till even his heart beats: One; One; One. 
• O murderers!…Still, this is how it’s done: 

• This is a war . . . But since these play, before they die, 
• Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man, 
• I did as these have done, but did not die— 
• I will content the people as I can 
• And give up these to them: Behold the man!

• I have suffered, in a dream, because of him, 
• Many things; for this last saviour, man, 
• I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? 
• Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: 
• I find no fault in this just man.

Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was an American poet who also wrote criticism, children’s books, essays and fiction. Winner of the National Book Award in 1961, Jarrell was a major figure in the “Middle Generation” of poets, which included Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. A native of Nashville TN, and student of three of the members of the Fugitive Movement—Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom—Jarrell adopted their formal approach to poetry without sharing their more conservative views of culture and politics. His early poetry reflected his experiences in the Air Force during World War II—including perhaps his most famous (or famously anthologized) poem, “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner.” While sometimes grouped with the “confessional” school of poets, which saw personal biography as a fit subject for poetry, Jarrell often wrote his poems through personae—such as dead servicemen or aging women looking back on their lives. Jarrell died under suspect circumstances; he was struck by a car, which some believe to have been a suicide (he had attempted to take his own life before), although family believed his death to be as the coroner ruled it: an accident.