Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa Poems

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
...

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
...

Usually at the helipad
I see them stumble-dance
across the hot asphalt
with crokersacks over their heads,
...

I sit beside two women, kitty-corner
to the stage, as Elvin's sticks blur
the club into a blue fantasia.
I thought my body had forgotten the Deep
...

The old woman made mint
Candy for the children
Who'd bolt through her front door,
Silhouettes of the great blue
...

The hills my brothers & I created
Never balanced, & it took years
To discover how the world worked.
We could look at a tree of blackbirds
...

The seven o'clock whistle
Made the morning air fulvous
With a metallic syncopation,
A key to a door in the sky---opening
...

Zeus always introduces himself
As one who needs stitching
Back together with kisses.
...

Someone says Tristan
& Isolde, the shared cup
& broken vows binding them,
...

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar's
...

At six, she chewed off
The seven porcelain buttons
From her sister's christening gown
& hid them in a Prince Albert can

On a sill crisscrossing the house
In the spidery crawlspace.
She'd weigh a peach in her hands
Till it rotted. At sixteen,

She gazed at her little brother's
Junebugs pinned to a sheet of cork,
Assaying their glimmer, till she
Buried them beneath a fig tree's wide,

Green skirt. Now, twenty-six,
Locked in the beauty of her bones,
She counts eight engagement rings
At least twelve times each day.
...

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered to footwork
...

When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning,
& someone ran knocking on our door
one night. The house became birds
...

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

I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
...

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask
the approaching day hides behind
& from, the coyote nosing forth,
...

I've come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to a place a few red anemones
...

Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate
what's going down in the streets.
...

19.

No, sweetheart, I said courtly love.
I was thinking of John Donne's
'Yet this enjoys before it woo,'
...

The sun slides down behind brick dust,
today's angle of life. Everything

melts, even when backbones
...

Yusef Komunyakaa Biography

Yusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1941) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world. His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Komunyakaa was probably born in 1941 (formerly cited as 1947) and given the name James William Brown, the eldest of five children of James William Brown, a carpenter. He later reclaimed the name Komunyakaa that his grandfather, a stowaway in a ship from Trinidad, had lost. He grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana, before and during the Civil Rights era. He served in the U.S. Army, serving one tour of duty in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and according to his former wife Mandy Sayer he was discharged on 14 December 1966. He worked as a specialist for the military paper, Southern Cross, covering actions and stories, interviewing fellow soldiers, and publishing articles on Vietnamese history, which earned him a Bronze Star. He began writing poetry in 1973 at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he was an editor for and a contributor to the campus arts and literature publication, riverrun. He earned his M.A. on Writing from Colorado State University in 1978, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. Komunyakaa married Australian novelist Mandy Sayer in 1985, and in the same year, became an associate professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He also held the Ruth Lilly Professorship for two years from 1989 to 1990. He and Sayer were married for ten years. He later had a relationship with India-born poet Reetika Vazirani, which ended when she took her own life and that of their 2-year old child Jehan in 2003. He taught at Indiana University until the fall of 1997, when he became an English professor at Princeton University. Yusef Komunyakaa is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.)

The Best Poem Of Yusef Komunyakaa

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
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's 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
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Yusef Komunyakaa Comments

william flud 02 April 2019

I really enjoyed reading prisoners poem and would like an audience with you, I am a enduring freedom vet of 20 years poetry is what I like to write as well as read. Please contact me if that is possible, thank you Mr. Komunyakaa.

3 0 Reply
S. Rice 22 November 2017

Just came across the poem Blessing the Animals. It's wonderful: funny and haunting, too. Thank you, Mr. Komunyakaa.

4 3 Reply
Grandpoet Taiwo 28 August 2012

I heard Chris Abani recite ODE TO DRUM, it was just the transformation i needed as a writer.

19 6 Reply

Yusef Komunyakaa Popularity

Yusef Komunyakaa Popularity

Close
Error Success