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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Poem by Randall Jarrell
"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is a five-line poem by Randall Jarrell published in 1945.
The poem is about the death of a gunner in a Sperryball turret on a World War II Americanbomber aircraft.
Randall jarrell poems
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.
Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note:
A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17, B-24, B-25, B-32 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