Blog 7: DW

Yusef Komunyakaa's poems give off a powerful vibe of the effect the atrocities of the Vietnam War had on his psyche. The vivid imagery subtly laced with violence portrays the reality of the Vietnam War in his eyes. Far from literature and other media, which glorifies war, the scars Komunyakaa brought home are evident in his poems. His feelings on the war come across strongly, even to people who have never been to war. His poems that deal with death reveal messages about the terrible effects of war. Others address the fight for civil rights back home; fighting for a country who didn't fully accept him.

In "Roll Call" Komunyakaa describes an everlasting image of his of the memorials to his dead brothers. The poem is a tribute to all that is left of a soldier: "each M-16 propped upright between a pair of boots, a helmet on its barrel". There is one kind of sadness in "those five pairs of boots", or the five dead soldiers, and a different kind of sadness that reflects on what gets left behind. We can only imagine what it was like as his fellow soldiers died, and funeral filled his days, going to bed next to all the empty bunks. The poem serves to emphasize the harshness of death and the effects it had on the morale of soldiers.

More than death, Komunyakaa reacts to the consequences of it. In "Better Days" he writes of a mother who loses her son, refusing to acknowledge his death. You can picutre an old woman standing in her son's empty room, his flag and Silver Star hidden away, rejecting the idea he will never come home. Not often enough do we consider the effects of war on the mothers and fathers whose sons never made it home; the wounds ripped in those families who paid an enormous price during the war. His poems reoccur with this idea that death has pervasive effects, immediately touching the soldiers and having forever resounding effects on the mothers whose very sanity is compromised by their dead sons.

He also speaks to feeling the potential futility of what he was doing. In "Hanoi Hannah" he seems to be asking himself why he and his fellow black soldiers are fighting this war. Back home the civil rights movement was in full swing, referring in the poem to the assassination of Martin Luther King, "You're dead as King today in Memphis". I think during the war he thought a lot about why he was there when he was fighting for a country that oppressed his race and would only do so when (or if) he returned home. The line "Soul Brothers, what are you dying for?" truly expresses the confusion that muddled his feelings on fighting in Vietnam.