It was not dying: everybody died. <br />It was not dying: we had died before <br />In the routine crashes-- and our fields <br />Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, <br />And the rates rose, all because of us. <br />We died on the wrong page of the almanac, <br />Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; <br />Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend, <br />We blazed up on the lines we never saw. <br />We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. <br />(When we left high school nothing else had died <br />For us to figure we had died like.) <br /> <br />In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed <br />The ranges by the desert or the shore, <br />Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores-- <br />And turned into replacements and woke up <br />One morning, over England, operational. <br /> <br />It wasn't different: but if we died <br />It was not an accident but a mistake <br />(But an easy one for anyone to make.) <br />We read our mail and counted up our missions-- <br />In bombers named for girls, we burned <br />The cities we had learned about in school-- <br />Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among <br />The people we had killed and never seen. <br />When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; <br />When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.' <br /> <br />They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities. <br /> <br />It was not dying --no, not ever dying; <br />But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead, <br />And the cities said to me: 'Why are you dying? <br />We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?'<br /><br />Randall Jarrell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/losses/
