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The Poem
“Facing It” has been widely anthologized in textbooks, in part because it deals so powerfully with the
Vietnam War. The poem provides few answers to the complex questions the war has raised in the United
States, but it approaches the subject in ways that can help heal the multiple scars the war has left.
The poem describes a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., by an African American
veteran who plainly saw action in the war, but its lines hardly provide the kind of psychological closure
readers might expect from such a visit. The first-person narrator sees his “black face” fading, “hiding inside
the black granite” of the Memorial, and a series of crucial oppositions is established at the opening which will
work throughout the poem: outside/inside the wall, now/then, reality/illusion, life/death. This first visit to the
Memorial is clearly an emotional experience for the narrator, and he has promised himself he will not cry;
however, and in another binary opposition, he is “flesh,” he reminds himself, not “stone.” Everything is
distorted in the surface of the black granite: his own reflection “eyes [him]/ like a bird of prey,” like the
opposition of night to morning. When he looks away, he is freed (“the stone lets me go”), but when he looks
at his reflection, “I’m inside/ the Vietnam Veterans Memorial/ again, depending on the light/ to make a
difference.” This last line suggests that the visit is a little less fearful in the day, perhaps, for the “light”
reminds him that he is outside the black granite, not trapped inside it as in a tomb, or, symbolically, inside the
darkness which is Vietnam, in both the American experience and its collective memory of that war.
These first thirteen lines act as a kind of prelude to the subject, mood, and manner of the whole poem; at line
14, the narrator starts reading...