The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
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.
Okay. Not gonna lie. After I read the poem for the first time, I still had no clue what a "Ball Turret" was so I had to look it up. It is, in fact, a ball that is rotating with mounted machine guns located underneath the aircraft. The gunner is what actually sits inside this ball. Ahhhh! This makes sense to me now. This poem is pretty much about a soldier (who is the narrator), who is in this ball turret and suddenly is killed. What I find most fascinating about this poem is the ending. It's brilliant that Randall Jarrell continued to have the dead soldier narrate his (the soldier's) death.
From the very first line, the gunner tells us that he has fallen from his mother's sleep. This most likely points out the idea that since his mother gave birth to him, he has now ended up in such "State", death. The soldier goes on to describing the setting in which he is located at his death. He describes how cold he is so he balls up in the "belly". Lines one and two definitely connect: The belly of the "State" he is in, is his mother. Weird connection. The next line again describes the setting in which the soldier is in: "six miles from earth". Reading this for the first time, I just assumed that this distance was because he was flying in the aircraft. As I read it for the second time, I thought of how the soldier is in the heavens, as it is "a dream of life". But then death comes back into the picture. The "black flak" is the soldier's death that is actually his "dream of life". Oddly enough, he ends on a very straightforward note with the very last line. This last line could also reflect his mother that he was once hunched in. Figuratively, the solder has died of a possible abortion. This poem is crazy!
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