Topic > Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa - 578

“Facing It” by Shreveport-based black American poet Yusef Komunyakaa is written with the use of visual imagery. Yusef Komunyakaa writes about one of his many trips to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. This Memorial is a long polished slab of reflective black granite with the names of all the American soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. Yusef says that “my black face fades away, hiding in the black granite.” Here Yusef uses his reflection in the wall to bring the reader back to the war and how he feels about the wall now. It makes his feelings ambiguous and gives the reader the opportunity to decide what he is feeling through the use of visual imagery. For example, one of these images can be interpreted in the section “My blurred reflection looks at me, like a bird of prey, the profile of the night, tilted to the morning”. By saying this he makes the reader understand that he is feeling many things by seeing his reflection among the names of the fallen. He sees his reflection through the granite and thinks of himself in the wall looking at him like a bird of prey. They...