Discovering Poet Yosef Komunyakaa on Memorial Day 2018

I discovered a poet I should have known about many years ago. Yosef Komunyakaa. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994 for his book, "Neon Vernacular."  I'm ordering it on Amazon, along with a few others of his works. I've spent most of the day, between doing some gardening, reading his poems online, enrapt in metaphors, allusions and fanciful reflections.

My friend Alice Twombly brought Komunyakaa to my attention on this Memorial Day, May 28, 2018, when we have a self-absorbed lying traitor in the White House who cannot commemorate the day without making it about himself. 

Alice and I noted the offense. She suggested I look up Komunyakaa's poem "Facing it."  And I did.   It's how a real warrior, a Vietnam Vet from Louisiana, a poet soldier, would remember the day. Alice, the master teacher, is teaching the poem to her class tomorrow, so it's fresh on her mind. I wish I could be there.

Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, DC

The poem is about  Komunyakaa's visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and, yes, facing it: facing the war. Facing the horror, the pain, the loss.  The poet becomes absorbed in the glossy black granite of the wall, a mirror, etched "like  smoke" with the names of those who died. His name's not there, but he finds the name of a friend. He cannot hide what he sees, "I see the booby trap's white flash." He's inside the horror, inside that shiny black granite, absorbed in images and memories that he doesn't want to remember. "Metaphor meets monument," Robin Ekess put it in a Poetry's Foundation's interpretation of the poem.  Komunyakaa the poet meeting Maya Lin, the architect.

Komunyakaa's poem, like Lin's wall, is a powerful metaphor for this Memorial Day 2018, facing the reality of what war means, facing the truth.

Facing It, by Yosef 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.

President Obama tweeted what many of us feel about this day.  "We can never truly repay the debt we owe our fallen heroes. But we can remember them, honor their sacrifice, and affirm in our own lives those enduring ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity for which generations of Americans have given that last full measure of devotion,” he  tweeted.  This is what we needed to hear on this Memorial Day 2018, and the dirge for fallen soldiers. .

Source:
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Dodgepoetry.org.

Brief  biography: Internet Poetry Archive.
Komunyakaa was born on 29 April 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisanna, the oldest of five children. His  childhood experiences inform many of his works: his family relationships, growing up in a rural Southern community, being close to the jazz and blues environment of  New Orleans.  He was born James William Brown. He legally changed his name to Komunyakaa in memory of his grandfather, who was from the West Indies and, as family legend went, had arrived in America as a stowaway on a ship. After  high school he joined the Army and served in Vietnam (1969-70), working as a war correspondent and specialist for the military paper Southern Cross, covering actions and stories of fellow soldiers. After his tour of duty, he went to the University of Colorado and discovered his love of poetry. He spent time with the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center after getting an MFA from the U. of California at Irvine, a transformative experience. "A sort of unearthing has to take place," he wrote," Sometimes one has to remove layers of facades and superficialities.  The writer has to get down to the guts of things and rediscover the basic timbre of his or her existence."  He's a prolific writer, with dozens of books to his name, among them Pleasure Dome, Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Thieves of Paradise, Neon Vernacular, and Magic City.  He teaches creative writing at NYU.