Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who has served for the army as well. He worked for the military newspaper Military Cross during his stint with the armed forces in the Vietnam War. He is also a winner of many prestigious awards, that include the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, and Louisiana Writer Award. He wrote the poem 'Facing It' almost a decade after the war. The speaker, a war veteran, visits the 'Vietnam Veterans Memorial', which has been built to commemorate the personnel who were killed or have been missing in action in the war. A visit to this structure sparks off flashbacks of the war that haunt him and invoke many painful memories. These lead the speaker to question his identity. Here is the summary and analysis of the poem. The speaker experiences a loss of identity when he looks at the memorial, which is a granite wall, and his 'black face' is no longer differentiable from the wall. He reminds himself that he is strong and has no emotion, like a 'stone'. He, however, ends up breaking down as he is a human, 'flesh'. The meaning of the 'clouded reflection' here is the events that the speaker had to face in the past, the memories of which are back to haunt him. These experiences are dangerous, dark, and they threaten to return. They form an imagery for him from which he wants to get away. He is too involved with the past that comes flooding back when he is inside the memorial. He has doubts raised over his identity when he sees his reflection on the war memorial, which keep on appearing and disappearing depending on the 'light'. The speaker skims through the names of 58,022 personnel who had lost their lives or were missing since the war, half-expecting to find his name to be on that list. He finds a familiar name on the memorial wall, and is reminded of how the person, Andrew Johnson, had died. The lines between past and present begin to blur, as his memories from the war begin to resurface. His train of thought is broken because of the flapping wings of a bird, which he compares to a 'brushstroke'. Soon, he drifts back to what he thinks are his days on the field, but soon realizes that he is remembering motherly affection. The theme of this poem, through the speaker, gives us a peek into one of the most difficult phases a person can face in a lifetime. The experiences of the speaker during the war, which has been subjected to a critical analysis for a long time, and after the war, can be construed as the challenges that the poet himself had to overcome.