Patrick+Heller-+Yusef+Komunyakaa



Patrick Heller
 * Yosef Komunyakaa**

We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank,
 * Camouflaging the Chimera**

blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird's target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America. We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons

crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal,

till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk

wrestling iron through grass. We weren't there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath,

ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man's eyelid.



This poem starts out with the imagery of soldiers, as it talks about camouflage and helmets. While not using the term camouflage in the poem, the title suggests that the foliage attached to the helmets was an effort to distort the image of the silhouette of that soldier. The who first stanza talks about their efforts of preparation to hide and paint their beings so that they will not be detected. The point is to not look like soldiers, in fact the point is to look as far from a soldier as possible. They want to blend in and become a part of their surroundings as they hide in plain sight, ready to ambush and kill the enemy at close range. The second stanza touches more upon this notion of becoming one with the jungle of Vietnam. “We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target.” Their purpose was to appear as foliage or as trees (hummingbird’s target). “tiger suits” is an allusion to the different type of camouflage that these special forces used, which was different from standard issue olive green uniforms. They had various shades of green and brown and came to be known as tiger suits because of their slim lined patterns matching that of a tiger. It is interesting because Komunyakaa himself was never a part of this type of search and destroy unit, as he was a journalist during the war. I guess he wants to show the extent of the effort these elite units spent to perform a simple “L-Shaped” ambush. In the other parts of the poem Komunyakaa describes more of what goes through a soldier’s mind during the dull waiting periods waiting for the enemy to walk into an ambush. Silently, a soldier may think of women back home or memories of a recent leave in one of the bigger cities of Southeast Asia. Komunyakaa doesn’t spend too much time on this theme, but in a few of his other poems he works to show the emotional side of soldiers fighting away from home.


 * 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 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">my own in letters like smoke. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">I touch the name Andrew Johnson; <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">I see the booby trap's white flash. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">Names shimmer on a woman's blouse <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">but when she walks away <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">the names stay on the wall. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">wings cutting across my stare. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">The sky. A plane in the sky. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">A white vet's image floats <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">closer to me, then his pale eyes <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">look through mine. I'm a window. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">He's lost his right arm <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">inside the stone. In the black mirror <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">a woman’s trying to erase names: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">**Perhaps one of Komunyakaa’s more well-known poems, “Facing It” speaks about the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. This poem was also featured in our class and also on a previous AP exam I believe.**

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Facing it was written as a first person perspective as one of the names on the stone in the beginning of the poem. As Komunyakaa is black, he does say how his identity as a black man fades into the stone as he is no longer remembered as a person, but as a name. A statistic. This idea pervades the poem as the incincerity is apparent in the way in which he starts out the poem. The contradiction hits this soldier in the lines when he states, “I’m stone. I’m flesh.” This quick change in being hints upon how those of the Wall are remembered, meaning some remember them as the heroes they were or simply just one name of thousands inscribed on a granite memorial. This contrast is an interesting view even still because it is all still from a dead soldier looking out from a stone wall.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Speaking of the Wall, later on in the rest of the poem, it is considered to be a metaphor for the War itself. As “she walks away, the names stay on the wall” shows how even though civilian life goes on, the dead remain dead and are easily forgotten. When the “white vet” comes close, it is mentioned that he “lost his right arm inside the stone” showing another connection to the wall as War. The stone’s symbolism as war works to show the separation between civilians and those that were/are in the Wall. The nice shiny outside layer of the granite hides a hard brutal solid granite core that is infused with steel to support it.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Hiding inside the black granite” shows the way in which the dead soldier has a barrier between himself and the general public, as they will never quite understand what it is like to serve and die for a war (an unpopular war at that). The woman “trying to erase names… brushing a boy’s hair” shows the contradiciting views of the names as a statistic or person as she either combs the boy’s hair or fruitlessly tries to remove him from the wall.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Tunnels **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yusef Komunyakaa



<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Crawling down headfirst into the hole, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">he kicks the air and disappears <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">I feel like I’m down there with him, moving ahead, pushed by a river of darkness, feeling <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">blessed for each inch of the unknown. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Our tunnel rat is the smallest man in the platoon, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">in an echo chamber that makes his ears bleed <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">when he pulls the trigger. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">He moves as if trying to outdo <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">blind fish easing toward imagined blue, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">pulled by something greater than life’s <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">ambitions. He can’t think about <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">spiders & scorpions mending the air, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">or care about bats upside down like gods in the mole’s blackness. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The damp smell goes deeper <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">than the stench of honey buckets. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">A web of booby traps waits, ready <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">to spring into broken stars. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Forced onward by some need <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">some urge, he knows the pulse <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">of mysteries & diversions <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">like thoughts trapped in the ground <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Every cornered shadow has a life <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">He questions each root. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">to bargain with. Like an angel <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">pushed up against what hurts, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">his globe-shaped helmet <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">follows the gold ring his flashlight casts into the void. Through silver <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">he goes, the good soldier, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">on hands & knees, tunneling past <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">death sacked into a blind corner, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">loving the weight of the shotgun <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">that will someday dig his grave.

Call of Duty... : []

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In Vietnam, Viet-Cong loved to use tunnels to safely evade detection during the Vietnam War. So naturally, the military was forced to clear these tunnels. Many times, regular soldiers were chosen because of their small size to go alone into the darkness to search and kill any enemy combatants living in these cramped quarters. Beyond primitively built and liable to collapse, each tunnel was possibly filled with booby traps and or angry little Vietnamese soldiers waiting to kill the lone soldier. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The poem takes the reader through this experience, starting with the awkward inverted entry of the “tunnel rat” into the hole. The kicking of the air suggests his being awkward and out of place as well as his disparity in the situation. The tunnel rat was always the smallest in the platoon as Komunyakaa points out, because for obvious reasons the Vietnamese were much smaller than the average American. The “echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger” is just that. When you fire a gun in an enclosed space, the pressure overwhelms your eardrums. There is not much more significance to this statement other than to point out the further discomfort of the hole. “He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish” clearly is symbolic speech to how slowly and quietly he moves in this echo chamber. The slightest sounds could result in his death. The tunnel rat must be focused and can not think about the clear discomfort he is in, between the rats and bugs and horrid smell coming from the tunnel. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The “web of booby traps” are the clear danger that he goes for but just continues to push on “forced by some need”. He is very attentive at this point, paying attention and “questions each root” for any signs of tampering or possible trip wires to a booby trap. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The horrible situation he is in does not change, but he continues on, fulfilling his duty as a good soldier. He does it because he knows if he doesn’t, someone else will have to go through this and clear the tunnel at later date.

Thanks for the tree between me & a sniper’s bullet. I don’t know hwat made the grass sway seconds before the viet Cong raised his soundless rifle. Some voice always followed, telling me which foot to put down first. Thanks for deflecting the ricochet against that anarchy of dusk. I was back in San Francisco wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors, causing some dark bird’s love call to be shattered by daylight when my hands reached up & pulled a branch away from my face. Thanks for the vague white flower that pointed to the gleaming metal reflecting how it is to be broken like mist over the grass, as we oplayed some deadly game for blind gods. What made me spot the monarchwrtihing on a single thread tied to a farmer’s gate, holding the day together like an unfingered guitar string, is beyond me. maybe the hills grew weary & leaned a little in the heat. Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet outside Chu Lai. I’m still fallinvg trhough its silence. I don’t know why the intrepid sun touched the bayonet, but I know that something stood among those lost trees & moved only when I moved.
 * Thanks**

Komunyakaa, like every soldier, expects at some point that they are going to die. All veterans and survivors of terrible incidents ask the question, “why me, why did God choose me to live?” Komunyakaa addresses this question in a quasi-religious manner by thanking God(?) for all these fortunate events that befell him in war. Komunyakaa first describes a situation where he saw a sniper before any shot was fired, because he saw a little flower that caught his attention. These few seconds of time gave him the opportunity to take cover behind a tree. These few seconds perhaps saved his life, and Komunyakaa accounts this to the flower that he noticed. The “vague white flower that pointed to the gleaming metal” is what he claims saved his life, and that he credits God for saving him through that flower. Also another saving moment mentioned in the poem is the dud hand grenade. Grenades are meant to explode, and a large majority of the time they do. Thanks to God and perhaps human error, Komunyakaa was saved from being blown into tiny bits. Truly another miracle. Komunyakaa shows thankfulness but also questions the “why me” aspect of it all. “I don’t know why the intrepid sun touched the bayonet, but I know that something stood among those trees.” Komunyakaa feels blessed and is thankful for being saved in this poem.