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.
Mirrors often show up in poetry in symbolic roles, as self-knowledge, distortion, doubles, and thresholds. Let's look at some varied approaches to the mirror in poetry.
"Mirror" by Sylvia Plath is probably the most famous “mirror poem.” The mirror speaks here in a cold, objective voice: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.” It becomes a symbol of unyielding truth, especially as a woman ages and confronts her changing identity. The mirror is not comforting; it is brutally honest, almost inhuman.
In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" by Anne Sexton, she rewrites the fairy tale, focusing on the mirror as an instrument of patriarchal judgment and female self-surveillance.
An early example is "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The lady of the poem lives under a curse and can only see the world through a mirror, never directly. Today, we might call this mediated reality. When she turns away from it to look directly, her world collapses. This poem explores the danger of moving from **illusion into reality**, and the cost of authentic experience.
I have always loved the mirror as a portal or threshold, as in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Okay, it is prose, but Lewis Carroll embedded poems in the book. He treats the mirror as a passage into an inverted world. That is a classic metaphor for crossing into the unconscious or the surreal.
What we see when we look in a mirror might be an uncanny double. "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa is set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is a reflective black surface. The speaker sees his own face merge with the names of the dead. That mix - “I’m stone. I’m flesh” mixes past and present, self and ghost.
Send us a poem that uses mirrors in some symbolic way.
Yusef Komunyakaa was born on April 29, 1947, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he was raised during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
He served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent, then as managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam war, which earned him a Bronze Star.
Poet Yusef Komunyakaa first received recognition following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences.
His work blends the realities of the Vietnam War, and the complex textures of Southern vernacular. He gained widespread recognition with Dien Cai Dau (1988), a seminal collection capturing the psychological and physical landscape of the war.
In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, which solidified his reputation as a master of vernacular rhythm and surreal imagery.
The deadline for submissions for the next issue is June 30, 2026.
Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of more than 300 prompts and poems. Follow our
blog for prompts and other topics in poetry.
