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Two poems for Memorial Day by Randall Jarrell
"Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" and "Losses"
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
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.
Losses
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes—and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores—
And turned into replacements and worked up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
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."
They said, "Here are the maps;" we burned the cities.
It was not dying —no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was an American poet who also wrote criticism, children’s books, essays and fiction. Winner of the National Book Award n 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 suspicious circumstances; he was struck by a car, which some believe to have been a suicide (he had attempted to take his own life before). But his family believed his death to be as the coroner ruled it: an accident.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Two poems for Memorial Day by Randall Jarrell
"Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" and "Losses"
Two poems for Memorial Day by Randall Jarrell
"Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" and "Losses"
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
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.
Losses
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes—and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores—
And turned into replacements and worked up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
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."
They said, "Here are the maps;" we burned the cities.
It was not dying —no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was an American poet who also wrote criticism, children’s books, essays and fiction. Winner of the National Book Award n 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 suspicious circumstances; he was struck by a car, which some believe to have been a suicide (he had attempted to take his own life before). But his family believed his death to be as the coroner ruled it: an accident.
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