Once upon a time

In undergrad, we had a very lovely (if not slightly crazy) student who tried to convince the rest of us in the class that Randall Jarrell's poem Death of the Ball Turret Gunner was about abortion. Someone asked me a question about this poem today and it reminded me of that day. Here is the poem. You decide.

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.