Facing It

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.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

Commentary

This poem bridges the past and present. In a way, it does what war does to the minds of those who have lived through it: it rips a hole in present reality and invites the specters of the past in. Sometimes, we cannot even tell the difference between what was then and what is now. The two merge the way a lion merges with its prey when it bites down.

This is not an easy poem, nor should it be. Spanning the topics of race, war, trauma, and loss, reading it is like ripping the bandage off of a wound in order to clean it.

Yet these things must be faced.

As a nation that’s been at war for most of my lifetime, we would do well to “Face it” as Komunyakaa does, without providing easy answers, but by staring the reality of war squarely in the face.