I really enjoyed Yusef Komunyakaa's poem, "Facing It". It is about a black Vietnam Veteran who is at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington D.C. He stands before the wall and his thoughts fade to the war and back again to the present. I really liked how the author's word brought the image to life. I felt as though I could see the wall and the reflections in it.
             The line, "My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite", makes me think of the wall as being connected to the man because of it's black color. He reads the names on the wall "half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke", leads me to think that part of him died with the war. He struggles to keep his composure and not let the memories get to him. When he find's the name Andrew Johnson he gets an image of "the booby trap's white flash", and then he is brought back to the present when a woman's reflection passes him on the wall. I have been to the memorial and I can vividly picture the scene in my mind. The reflective granite makes the onlooker at once part of the wall and separate from it. I can just imagine the man standing before the wall and feeling like he was the wall and yet not. I saw many veterans at the wall when I went and I imagine that many of them felt how the veteran in the poem felt when the faced the wall for the first time.
             The lines of the poem that I liked best were, "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." I can just image looking at the wall and having someone look at your reflection, and then looking through it to read the names on the wall. I can see how he'd feel like a window. I also found it interesting how he says that the vet "lost his right arm inside the wall." It almost seems like he sees the ...