Four Freedoms Park
Roosevelt Island, New York City
The fourth is freedom from fear . . .
—Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Annual Message to Congress January 6, 1941
The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor . . .
—Henry Miller
Then—as if someone had switched on a black light in the sky—
the traceries of dread just visible all around her, the curving
trajectories of each possible disaster
once seen, now indelible
*
Bristling stems of mugwort sheared to resemble a lawn
rhizomatic: ineradicable
each torn scrap giving rise
to a new plant
hundred
handed
*
The Penitentiary Hospital
The New York City Lunatic Asylum
The Blackwell Island Workhouse
The Smallpox Hospital
The Charity Hospital
“our standing army of paupers, criminals, and sick poor”
This whole repurposed
Island
dry sponge of rootstalks, map
of the neural pathways
tunneled out
by fear
*
Her eight-year-old at the beach adorning
his ring of sandcastles with bits of shell and twig reciting the “Day
of Infamy” speech, “we will not only defend ourselves
to the uttermost
but will make it very certain
that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The crumbling
gray crenellations
*
The smallpox
hospital “our only
landmarked ruin”
“No Trespassing: Structure is unstable” the winsome
insinuations
of bindweed
at its feet
its gaping gneiss face blushed
with Virginia creeper its body a copse of sumac
*
In Korea, smallpox is referred to as “Your Majesty” in an effort to
appease the god.
Eradicated circa 1980.
Who now will ride
the horses made of straw
made to tempt the smallpox
spirits to ride home?
*
Plaques of cellophane
stillness
subdue the East River
The tram released like a dispensation across the swollen sky “the line
of flight
is part of the rhizome. These lines
always tie back to one another.”
Garbage circulating underground
soundlessly, a system
of pneumatic tubes
*
The monument’s honed granite
perpendiculars
a luxury of specific intention, like all luxuries most
poignant at its defined
edges, subject
to encroachment, exhaustion
riprap
loosestrife, prostrate spurge
From You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024), edited by Ada Limón. Copyright © 2024 Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress. Used with the permission of the author. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In my son’s early infancy, I was staying near Roosevelt Island and spent many afternoons taking the tram over and circumambulating the little island. The FDR Memorial in Four Freedoms Park, a luxurious geometry of honed granite, is the play/picnic ground for local families, many of whom are Asian American and drawn by the island’s sterile high-rise condos and the promise of a car-free, crime-free New York City neighborhood. The ubiquity of Asian American faces sharpened the many ironies of FDR’s Four Freedoms, a speech he gave in the same year in which, caving to wartime racism, he signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. The memorial also abuts the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital, and ties into the island’s long history as a site of segregation and confinement for those deemed criminal, insane, or poor––a reminder that, in the U.S., freedom for some has always come at the expense of incarceration for others.”
––Monica Youn
Monica Youn
Monica Youn grew up in Houston, Texas. She received a BA from Princeton University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.