Youth

Both Komenyakaa and Turner make use of an image of childhood in their poems Facing It and The Al Harishma Weapons Market respectively.  In both cases, the presumed innocence of youth is used in the context of something terrible, war or death.  In Facing It, the author sees the reflection of a woman brushing a child's hair superimposed on the names of the dead on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall.  Yosef describes the image as looking like the woman is trying to erase the names.  The meaning of this parallel is not explicitly clear; perhaps her nurturing the child and sheltering it from horrible memories of war is somehow likened to erasing the atrocities of history.  Turner describes the son of an underground arms dealer in Iraq being afraid of the noise and lights of the bullets outside, and writes that his father is equally afraid.  The innate fear of the child who does not understand the context of war remains, even in the adult who is presumably mature enough to choose sides in the matter.