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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa
Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947, Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of numerous books of poems, including Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Assault to Abjury
by Raymond McDaniel
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Hum
by Ann Lauterbach
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
Stillbirth
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Second Coming
by W. B. Yeats
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
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Facing It  
by 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.



From Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa. Copyright © 1988 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.
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