“Facing It” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa about his visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, several years after his return from the Vietnam War. He encounters his reflection in the polished black surface of the memorial wall, where the names of dead and missing soldiers are inscribed, and struggles to hold back tears. Confronting his reflection in the wall is unsettling, for he feels both the same as and different from the person looking back at him. He experiments with how his reflection changes depending on the angle and the light. When his reflection vanishes, he feels as though the memorial “let him go,” and when his reflection reappears, he feels as though he’s “inside” the memorial. Throughout the poem, the speaker experiences the emotional truths of how the memorial's reflective surface clarifies and distorts the scene. Even when these interpretations are dispelled by the revelation of what is “actually” happening, their emotional resonance remains.
The speaker scans the 58,022 names of the dead, half-expecting to find his own name among them, but instead he finds the name Andrew Johnson, which he recognizes from the war. Seeing Andrew Johnson’s name sparks the memory of a booby trap’s explosion. The optical illusions created in the memorial’s reflective surface continue to capture the speaker's attention: the way that the names shimmer on a woman’s reflection, and the “brushstrokes” of a bird's reflection darting across the wall’s polished surface. The speaker’s eyes swerve between seeing the memorial itself and seeing the scene it reflects, just as his mind vacillates between the past and the present.
A white veteran’s reflection approaches the speaker’s reflection in the wall, and it appears as though his eyes look straight through the speaker. The speaker feels as though he’s been rendered invisible by this man, a sensation with clear racial undertones. The distortion of the white veteran’s reflection in the memorial makes it appear as though he lost his right arm inside the stone, an image evocative of the injury and illness plaguing many veterans of war. The final illusory image of the poem is of a woman whose reflection in the wall appears to be trying to erase the names inscribed in the memorial. On closer look, the speaker determines that the motion she’s actually making is brushing a boy’s hair. What appeared to be a futile, grief-stricken gesture is revealed to be an act of ordinary tenderness. At the end, a poem that has been so laden with the weight of the past shifts focus to possibilities of the present.
