by Scott McVay
The FDR Memorial
walks along the Potomac
the four-term
New Deal President’s
ideas are seized in stone
at each turn
The larger than life man is seen in 3D
the wife Eleanor
(alone) –– full height ––
in a kind of separate stand-alone
say it and speak to it (tomb)
Water splashes here and there, not only
in the coursing river,
the depression & war
receding years fly by
in a past
larger deeper
than the future
Near the close,
knowing the earlier
low years of the mid 30s
is the Depression Bread Line,
the work that defines the memorial
what the crippled leader
sought to overcome
and did
It’s a somber hatted line of
five men, distilled from
George’s boyhood
so it was a little jolt
in June to see five Presidential Scholars
clowning & posing
interleaved in between
bright as they are
but not knowing
not knowing
what it’s like to be
without bread
what it’s taken to get
the frail democracy to
where we are
“click,” snap
“snap,” maybe click
and they’re gone,
the bread line stands
as a sober chrysalis
one of a 1,000 markers
defining who we are
where we’re heading
Your eyes are held
held by the gravity
of the men standing there
but eventually the eye
travels to the right
where a man is bent over
his radio
catching every word
of a fireside chat
and on the left
the Appalachian couple
(from Berkeley Heights
(Billy Kluver and his wife)
standing, emerging
and the whole, the three works
are the soul, the conscience,
the memory of the man
his years as leader
encompassing the attack on Pearl Harbor
& the galvanizing response
the words are Franklin Delano’s
the images George Segal’s
the memory indelible
the source a chicken coop
with wings Helen close by.
Scott McVay was founding executive director of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He was the 16th president of the Chautauqua Institution. He is fascinated by the songs of Nature and the songs of humanity.
The author notes: This poem, though written a dozen years ago, seems relevant to our times today and celebrates one of the Garden State’s great artists, George Segal, whose work, especially The Bread Line, redeems the memorial to FDR along the Potomac. (Not too long ago George’s widow Helen and daughter deeded his papers to the Princeton University Art Museum.)
