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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.
From The Complete Poems, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1980, page 144. This poem’s last line stunned me when I first read it, I think as a teenager. In his introduction to his complete poems, Jarrell said that “A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-2 and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine-guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose” (page 8). Jarrell’s The Bat Poet is one of my all-time favourite books.
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