Herbert Hoover Library
David Stephenson

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It’s right off I-80 in Iowa,

a complex covering several acres like

a golf course, with a clapboard village and

 

a one-room school house along gravel paths,

but the library is standard brick and glass,

low-slung with a sleek asphalt parking lot;

 

inside, we learn that Hoover used to be

a top-of-the-line mining engineer,

academic, and administrator

 

before entering politics to become

the scapegoat Great Depression president,

which is all that people remember now.

 

Half the scattered cars in the main lot

have out-of-state plates, so Hoover draws

a few tourists, if not whole buses full,

 

generating local employment

not tied to hog confinements or corn farms,

so he’s the default local hero there

 

and lynchpin of a cottage industry,

although the plaques say he left as a child

and never came back while he was alive.

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First published in Plainsongs, Fall 2025

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​David’s notes: “I visited my mother in my home town in 2017, with my brother Bob. There’s not a lot to do out there, so one day we went to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, which was about a one-hour drive each way. In early drafts of the poem, I included some stanzas on Lou Henry Hoover, Herbert’s geologist wife, who I found more impressive than him, but I eventually cut them out to focus on the fact that they had this big complex for a guy who moved away when he was eleven and only returned to get buried. I guess you have to work with what you’ve got.“

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David Stephenson is a retired manufacturing engineer from Detroit, and the editor of Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. His most recent collection is Wall of Sound (Kelsay Books, 2022).

 

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