Poetry+-+May+11


 * Facing It**

//Yusef Komunyakaa//

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Alexander Mitchell: This poem is very confusing to me. It seems that the narrator is a black American fighter in the Vietnam war. You can tell this when he says, "My Black face fades" (1). The poem is about an American Vietnam fighter seeing his own death, and seeing his own name on a memorial. The tone of the poem is very eerie and dark, especially the language used in the poem. The red bird seems to be a metaphor for death, and the sky is the last image that he saw before his death.