The Life of the Ball Turret Gunner
- after The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,
Randall Jarrell, 1945
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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.
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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Written on December 01, 2022
Submitted by on December 21, 2022
Modified on March 26, 2023
- 1:30 min read
- 66 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AX XBX CDX XEF XGG CFB XXX DHE XHX AXX A XDXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,574 |
Words | 299 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 4 |
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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/148239/the-life-of-the-ball-turret-gunner>.
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