The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell (1945)

To many of us, war is an abstract concept. We can choose to look away, ignore it, live our lives as normal while it wages, unceasingly, throughout the world. We can intellectually acknowledge the atrocities of war, then change the channel before it becomes too real, too much for us to bear.

This short poem speaks not only to the horrors of war, but to the casualness with which society views it. It is a brutal and necessary read.

Short Stuff:

• Jarrell was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which is what they used to call the U.S. Poet Laureate.
• He left teaching at the University of Texas, Austin in 1942 when he joined the Air Force. Clearly, serving in the armed forces during WWII had a deep impact on his poetry.

Topics

war; death & dying; birth (?); government; dehumanization

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The 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.

–Randall Jarrell