Martin Luther King Jr. Day
I don’t have a poem for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A separate post, with the poem of the week, will be out a little later today after this one.
What I do have are a few photos of the (relatively) recently unveiled National Memorial that honors Dr. King. If you haven’t been to Washington, D.C. in a while, you may not have seen this memorial. It was unveiled in 2011.
I saw this memorial and other D.C. sights on a trip last fall with my son’s eighth grade class. Two school busses, fifty or so kids, a dozen or more parents. The kids are 14 or 15. They were all pretty well-behaved, but they were still just 14-15 year olds. So it was an exhausting trip.
One outcome, however, are the photos I am sharing today.
Here are pics from Dr. King’s memorial:
It’s hard to get a handle on the scale of the memorial. The sculptor, Lei Yixin, was inspired by Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech, particularly the phrase “out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope”. For the sculptor, Dr. King represents that Stone of Hope, so he is shown, symbolically, emerging from the Mountain (of Despair) behind him. That is supposed to be a rolled up copy of his speech in his left hand.
A wonderful metaphor for the sculpture but beyond my ability to show you the full effect of the memorial photographically. For that you’ll have to check out other people’s photos.
When our group reached Dr. King’s memorial, it was getting close to dark. That why you see all those cool shadows and the deep greyish-blue to the sky in my photos. It is also what made it difficult for me to get a shot of the memorial itself with people in it, so you could see the scale. The sculpture is about 30 feet tall. I’m not good enough to keep people from becoming multi-colored smudges in front of the giant form in so little light. Especially without a tripod and some patient subjects.
Bust Commissioned by Congress
Here’s is the version of Dr. King memorialized in the bust in the rotunda of the capitol building, which we also saw on our trip. This is a bronze bust on a marble base:
This bust has been in the rotunda a bit longer than the Dr. King memorial has existed. John Wilson was selected in a Congressional competition overseen by the Joint Committee on the Library in 1984 to create the sculpture. The bust itself was unveiled in 1986.
Unlike the majestic, outward-focused visage Yixin created for the national memorial, Wilson’s sculpture is contemplative and inward-looking. It can be, potentially, a bit disturbing to see two such different memorials to Dr. King. We like our history, and our heroes, to be straight-forward and easily understood. If at all possible.
Yet without deep, internal, self-work, how can anyone truly focus outward, certain of their direction if not their ultimate success? Having both these representations of Dr. King provides a critical reminder that he was a real person, with ideas, feelings, dreams, hopes.
If we are to move forward in a complicated world without over-simplifying, we must have the moments of contemplation, and even doubt, in order to acknowledge real complexity, then face a purpose with firm intent.
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You can read my poems on this site or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves which is available in both ebook and print.
As always, comments welcome.