Or does it Explode?

Sometimes it takes only a snatch of a song or a few words to stop us for a few moments in our mad rush onwards.....

This poem by Langston Hughes (the title of which formed the heading of a chapter in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" ) is one such for me...

Barely a paragraph, in fact just of 10 lines in all, it manages to evoke perhaps centuries of injustice and the transformation of a people, an anthem perhaps not only of the Civil rights movement in the United States in the 60's but of such movements everywhere, though of course its only the non-violent part (or the more or less benign and co-opted part) of that civil rights movement that is usually given precedence over everything else.....

This poem, for me, captures an anger not easily produced by reams of history book pages....an anger which Martin Luther King must have felt before he was assassinated, by which time, he was thoroughly disillusioned with the American system and the dream he dreamed (a period of his life not usually given importance, as it conflicts with the well-constructed image that people have of him - the American Gandhi)....

So here is the poem.....

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?