The Life of the Ball Turret Gunner

- after The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,
Randall Jarrell, 1945

                           ----------

He is thirty-below at thirty-thousand feet
above the sepulchral sea just minutes
from the Brittany coast, hour from Augsburg,

rammed inside a spherical ball made of
aluminum, plexiglass, and vulnerability,
crouched like a fetus, a flying fetus,

a womb of doom without room, banging and
clanging like a wet towel on spin cycle, sucking
survival from an umbilical cord of oxygen,

wearing a forty-five pound flak suit as bulky as
medieval armor, sweating the electric-heated suit
doesn't short his life short, no room for a parachute

or claustrophobia, unable to swallow the taste of
metallic fear at the sight of approaching German
fighter planes, Messerschmitts, swarming like mayflies

around a street light, the voices of gunnery instructors
keening combat protocol in his flak-deafened ears,
the breath of fate breathing death down his neck
 
like an exposed vent of inevitability,
the continuous concussive touch of detonated
anti-aircraft cannon shells exploding

out of a broth of fog, shrapnel scraping his scalp,
flooding his googles with blinding blood,
the moment of truth yields to the moment of death,

or not, as this is not The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,
one in which the dead gunner was washed out of the
turret with a hose,

this is the Life of the Ball Turret Gunner,

my Dad,

who returned home in 1944 after 25 bomb runs
over Germany, got married, had a family,
and never once spoke of the war.
Not once.