DREAMERS AND THEIR DREAMS

By Debbie Bulloch


The other night I was reading a book of poetry when I came across a poem by the famous American writer and poet, Langston Hughes. It is a little poem, 11 lines and just 46 words long. Almost Haiku-like in its simplicity, Hughes’s poem titled “Harlem,” packs a powerful emotional punch.
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?

Langston was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry often spoke about the barriers facing American blacks as they sought a bigger share of the American Dream. In 1951–the year of the poem's publication–frustration characterized the mood of American blacks. The Civil War in the previous century had liberated them from slavery, and federal laws had granted them the right to vote and the right to own property. Continuing prejudice against blacks, however, relegated them to second-class citizenship. Consequently, blacks had to attend poorly equipped segregated schools and settle for jobs as porters, ditch-diggers, servants, shoeshine boys, and other menial occupations. By the mid-Twentieth Century, their frustration with inferior status became a powder keg, and the fuse was burning. Hughes well understood what the future held, as he indicates in the last line of the poem.

To read Hughes’s poem solely in the context of the struggles for racial equality, however, is to limit its universal message. I first read “Harlem” when I was in High School. But in the spring of my life Hughes’s simple, rhetorical questions did not resonate with me as powerfully as they do now. So the other night, as I re-read poem, the full implication of the poem’s six questions made me stop to think about my own dreams and what had become of them. Hughes’s poem made me realize that now, that I am in the midsummer of my life, there is still time to pursue those dreams – and keep them from exploding.

Have you ever wondered whatever happened to your youthful dreams and aspirations? What happened to the little girl who dreamed of someday becoming a ballerina? Or the little boy who wanted to grow up to be a fireman? What about the girl who dreamed of some day finding a cure to the cancer that destroyed her mom or dad? Or the little boy who wanted to end all wars so no more big brothers would have to die fighting wars in far flung places with unpronounceable names?

What happened to those dreams? Have you achieved your dreams? Are you still working on them? Or have you labeled them as far and hopeless and simply tossed them aside?

We all have dreams and aspirations; if a person stops dreaming he stops living. It is in our dreams that the essence of our very humanity takes flight making possible much of what is good and noble and beautiful in this world. The Bible tells us that the meek shall inherit the Earth; that may be true. But it is the dreamers who will turn it into a place worth living.

To paraphrase a quote I once read (I forget who the original writer was, I think it came from that Irish writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw).

Some men see things as they are and ask, "why?"
Other men dream of things that have never been and ask, "why not?"

I challenge you to look at your dreams, the unfulfilled ones, the discarded ones, the forgotten ones and ask yourself, “why not?”