Yusef Komunyakaa was born James Willie Brown Jr. in 1947 and raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He has taught in New Orleans public schools, at Indiana University, and at Princeton University, and he is currently teaching at New York University. Fresh out of high school, Komunyakaa enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam, an experience that permeates his poetry. It was many years before he felt he could write about his time spent there.

Speaking of his war experience to the New York Times, Komunyakaa said, “I never used the word ‘gook’ or ‘dink’ in Vietnam. There is a certain kind of dehumanization that takes place to create an enemy, to call up the passion to kill this person. I knew something about that growing up in Louisiana.” He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems.

Facing It

“Facing It”—about an encounter with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—is from Komunyakaa’s collection Dien Cai Dau (1988).

My black face fades,

hiding inside the black granite.

I said I wouldn’t,

dammit: No tears.

5

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.

10

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,

15

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

20

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.

25

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

30

a woman’s trying to erase names:

No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

(1988)