{Dwayne Betts}
Facing It
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.
Yusef Komunyakaa, "Facing It" from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems.Copyright © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
"I met my wife in a bookstore and read her my poetry before our first conversation was over."
Pardon me for saying this, but that is so cute. Also brilliant and bold strategy. I've suggested to my wife that there's a whole new kind of pimpin' being developed around stuff like this that melts women more effectively than the cliched macho bullshit of yore (at least the women who are truly worth "melting.") Very subversive, cold-blooded shit.
Thanks for that man. The best compliment I've gotten all day. The young brothers ain't up on it yet.
might have been talking about RollingStone earlier but this poem had me humming a little Jimi Hendrix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVvtIS2YGVI
Thanks for posting this.