NLC 1302; Blog 9; 11/18/2011

Mrs. Yu, I posted another poem earlier and it's still there, but I thought of this one and I like it better...

My mother’s father was an interesting man

Quirky, charming and mysterious

As a kid I never understood

What made my mom so furious

The man had two names

Brian, my grandpa, and George, a fugitive

His brilliance caused him fame

But he ended up in chains

For such a claustrophobic man

A prison cell is worse than death

So he made a noose out of the bed sheets

And took his final breath

NLC 1302; Blog 9; 11/18/2011

Since I was three years old

I had a shadow named Sally

She gave me a wonderful fifteen years

God bless her precious soul

I won’t forget that tragic day

My angel had to go away

She looked at me as if to say,

"Everything will be okay"

NLC 1302; Blog 8; 11/11/2011

            This poem is called "Facing It"andwaswritten byYusef Komunyakaa in 2001. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He is an omniscient narrator and he refers to himself in the first person. In the first two lines of the poem, he makes it clear that he is black. The memorial stone is black as well. He seems to form a connection between himself and the memorial as if his face blends in or “hides.” The poem has a very sad and somber tone. Going into the memorial, he knew it would be an emotional experience. He tried to dehumanize himself so that he would not get so emotional about it. “I said I wouldn’t dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh.” He seems to have a blurry sense of self. He goes through all the names of the people who died. He gives the specific number, 58,022 to draw attention to the massive amount of people who died in the war. “I touch the name Andrew Johnson.” He knew many of these men on a personal level, and touching their names on the stone makes it all more real that they are gone. He sees a woman in the Memorial and says “names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall.” What he means by this is that the woman goes and visits the memorial, but she does not take anything away, she is unaffected by it. She goes through her daily routine, not impacted by the deaths in the Vietnam war. Unlike the woman, he carries the pain of losing those men with him every day.