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From: gmf@uvacs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: Ball Turret Gunner
Message-ID: <1230@uvacs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Apr-84 23:01:53 EST
Article-I.D.: uvacs.1230
Posted: Sun Apr  8 23:01:53 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Apr-84 07:19:29 EST
Lines: 23


I was a little saddened a while ago when some one asking after Randall
Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" guessed it might have
been written by (I think) Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon -- anyhow,
he guessed a couple of WW I poets (even though there were no
ball turrets in WW I).  What saddened me is that so few otherwise
literate people know the names of any more or less contemporary poets.
Actually, Jarrell isn't even so contemporary.  He lived 1914-1965.

In any case, I don't think anyone on the net asked to see this powerful
little poem.  I can't resist posting it (in its breif entirety):


          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 Jarrell (1944)


     Gordon Fisher (...!uvacs!gmf)