Analysis of The Life of the Ball Turret Gunner
Thomas Molitor 1953 (Tacoma)
- 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,
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.
Scheme | AX XBX CDX XEF XGG CFB XXX DHE XHX AXX A XDXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10011011010 1001 111001110101 01011110 10100110110 1010100111 010010000100 1101001010 0111011100 1010110111010 01011010011100 1001011111101 01010100010101 101111111010 10100010110011 0101101101010 10111011 010110101100010 1101001111 0111101111 110111000100 00100111100 101101010 110111101011 10111101 010111101011 111111011011010 101011011110 10101 11011011010 101101011 1010011010100 01011101 11 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,574 |
Words | 299 |
Sentences | 3 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 4 |
Lines Amount | 34 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 99 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 21 |
About this poem
My Dad was a ball turret gunner in a B-17 in WWII and I wanted to pay tribute to him posthumously.
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"The Life of the Ball Turret Gunner" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/148239/the-life-of-the-ball-turret-gunner>.
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