"Facing It" is about the author, Yusef Komunyakaa returning to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and reminiscing about his past.

A white vets’ 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 (25/29)

What Yusef Komunyakaa is expressing is that as he is standing at the wall and another veteran who has survived is in his presents.  He says that the vet looks at his eyes and can see right through him.  This other vet is experiencing the pain that Yusef Komunyakaa is also facing; Yusef Komunyakaa cannot hide inside the granite.  That’s why he says he can see though him; the vet can see past the tuff image that Yusef Komunyakaa is trying to create.  Yusef Komunyakaa than states that he vet is missing his right arm, he says he lost it in the wall.  Again he is referring to the wall as the war.

        Another problem that Yusef Komunyakaa is having is facing the fact that he is alive and 58,022 people are dead.  Through out the poem he tries to imagine that the names are being erased off the wall and that the war never happened.  “Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse / but when she walks away / the names stay on the wall” (18-20).  He saw names on the woman’s shirt and hoped that they weren’t a reflection of the wall.  He wanted her to walk away and take the names that were reflected on her shirt with her.  Also, “a woman’s trying to erase names. / No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair. (30-31).  What Yusef Komunyakaa wants to see is a woman brushing the names off the wall, as if they were not supposed to be there, as if this did not happen.  Sadly, he realizes that he is just brushing her sons hair.  The brushing of the boy’s hair could symbolize two different things.  The mother of the boy could have lost her older son in Vietnam, and this was her way of soothing her pain.  Her running her hands through her son’s hair could symbolize something she used to do with her older son who she has lost.  Or it could just be a mother grooming her son’s hair because it was messy.  The impression that I got when I read those two lines was that the mother was brushing her son’s hair to soothe her pain.

        In conclusion, Yusef Komunyakaa does end up ‘facing it’.  In the beginning he tries to hide and make himself believe that the war did not happen.  He wants to believe that the names on the wall are a figment of his imagination.  However, he realizes that the names are never going to erase and the Vietnam War did happen; now he has to face his past.