Rita Dove was born in Akron, OH, in 1952 and has many poetry collections, honors, and awards to her credit. In works like the verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Sonata Mulattica (2009), Dove treats historical events with a personal touch, addressing her grandparents’ life and marriage in early 20th-century Ohio, the battles and triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and the forgotten career of black violinist and friend to Beethoven, George Polgreen Bridgetower. Poet Brenda Shaughnessy noted that “Dove is a master at transforming a public or historic element—re-envisioning a spectacle and unearthing the heartfelt, wildly original private thoughts such historic moments always contain.” In 1996 Dove received a National Humanities Medal. She is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
The Statue of Freedom is a bronze statue designed by Thomas
Crawford (1814–1857) that, since 1863, has crowned the dome of the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, D.C. Yesterday, January 21,
she would have witnessed the Women’s March on Washington, one of the largest
protests in U.S. history. In 1993, the statue was removed for repairs and Dove,
from her office as U.S. Poet Laureate, got a rare look at Lady Freedom up close. It inspired a poem that addresses “how in
our country, and as represented in the District of Columbia, you can see the
contrasts abutted right up against one another: poetry and pomp, government and
the disenfranchised, lofty ideals and complex reality,” she explains. This
statue was “not just Lady Freedom but also the troubling conscience standing on
the street corner demanding that we take a look, that we consider each of us as
individuals. We should not forget her lessons—even if the dream of America is
tarnished or eaten away by corrosion or in need of cleaning and repair, it is
not defunct.”
Lady Freedom Among Us
don't lower your eyes or stare straight ahead to where you think you ought to be going don't mutter oh no not another one get a job fly a kite go bury a bone with her oldfashioned sandals with her leaden skirts with her stained cheeks and whiskers and heaped up trinkets she has risen among us in blunt reproach she has fitted her hair under a hand-me-down cap and spruced it up with feathers and stars slung over her shoulder she bears the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs all of you even the least of you don't cross to the other side of the square don't think another item to fit on a tourist's agenda consider her drenched gaze her shining brow she who has brought mercy back into the streets and will not retire politely to the potter's field having assumed the thick skin of this town its gritted exhaust its sunscorch and blear she rests in her weathered plumage bigboned resolute don't think you can forget her don't even try she's not going to budge no choice but to grant her space crown her with sky for she is one of the many and she is each of us
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