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.
Fearless Furry at 31,00 Feet
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 Jerrell - published 1945
Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note:
A ball turret was an aluminum and Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, 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 fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.
[
][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Ball_Turret_Gunner]
WIKIPEDIARandall Jarrell
May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965
An American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress-a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.Among other honors, Jarrell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the years 1947–48; a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1951; and the National Book Award for Poetry, in 1961.
Jarrell went on to teach at the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1942. In 1942 he left the university to join the United States Army Air Forces. According to his obituary, he " as a flying cadet, he later became a celestial navigation tower operator, a job title he considered the most poetic in the Air Force." His early poetry, in particular The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, would principally concern his wartime experiences in the Air Force.
The Jarrell obituary goes on to state that "after being discharged from the service he joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., for a year. During his time in New York, he also served as the temporary book review editor for The Nation magazine". Jarrell was uncomfortable living in the city and "claimed to hate New York's crowds, high cost of living, status-conscious sociability, and lack of greenery." He soon left the city for the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina where, as an associate professor of English, he taught modern poetry and "imaginative writing".
