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.
Reflection:
Upon my first read of this poem, I thought this was a poem about a pregnancy. The first two lines talked about the narrator hunched into the belly of their mother while she slept, "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.", I just figured it was the a poem about an unborn child's thought. The part that says that this narrator has wet fur made me believe that the speaker was, in fact, not human: "And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze". The next line that says, "Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life", could symbolize how much longer this fetus, whether human or not, has until it joins us in this world; six miles could probably be construed as six months. The last two lines made me think that it was actually a poem about abortion: "I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose". I thought the black flak was whatever poison they use to kill the fetus before extracting it, and the part that said the when the narrator was dead they'd wash them out with a hose was when they were getting rid of the dead fetus. Reading the title one more time, I wondered what a ball turret gunner was, so I looked it up and found out that it was the gunner in the underbelly of a war plane. The whole point of this poem to me completely changed. Instead of an abortion, I thought of a very hairy guy, due to the fact that he says his wet fur froze, who was shot or had exploded in this Ball Turret, and they have to wash out all his pieces.
Great discussion of symbolism!
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