Compare and contrast two poems

Yusef Komunyakaa's verse “Facing It” recounts a Vietnam War veteran's painful know-how of travelling to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. From meetings and biographical details, we can assume the speaker of the verse is Komunyakaa himself. Komunyakaa assisted in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967, and his recollections of those years haunt him when he visits the memorial, causing him to inquiry his own persona as a black, Vietnam War veteran and the kind of survivor he has become.

Told in the first individual, Komunyakaa's verse draws on the physical properties of the memorial sculpture itself to ...