Harvard University Club of Houston

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

  by Randall Jarrell

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.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15309#sthash.vddpOjU5.dpuf

• Jarrell wrote an explanatory note for this poem and it helps the reader get a better visual and physical sense of what he is talking about. Here it is:
• 
  "A ball turret was a plexiglass 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 foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."

For the Union Dead
 by Robert Lowell

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.

The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled

to burst the bubbles

drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back.  I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,

I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.

Its Colonel is as lean

as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound's gentle tautness;

he seems to wince at pleasure,

and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man's lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die--

when he leads his black soldiers to death,

he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year--

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son's body was thrown

and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"

that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone.  Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

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Walt Whitman (1819–1892).  Leaves of Grass.  1900. 

118. Cavalry Crossing a Ford 

BY THE BIVOUAC'S FITFUL FLAME.

BY the bivouac's fitful flame,

A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but 
         first I note, 

The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim 
         outline, 

The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,

Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,

The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily 
         watching me,) 

While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous 
         thoughts, 

Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those 
         that are far away; 

A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,

By the bivouac's fitful flame.

1861

ARM’D year! year of the struggle! 
No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year! 
Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas 
piano; 
But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, 
carrying a rifle on your shoulder, 
With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands–with a knife in 
the belt at your side, 
As I heard you shouting loud–your sonorous voice ringing across the 
continent; 
Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities, 
Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the 
dwellers in Manhattan; 
Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and 
Indiana, 
Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait, and descending the 
Alleghanies; 
Or down from the great lakes, or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along 
the Ohio river; 
Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at 
Chattanooga on the mountain top, 
Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing 
weapons, robust year; 
Heard your determin’d voice, launch’d forth again and again; 
Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon, 
I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year. 

Walt Whitman