'Dream Deferred (Harlem)' Harlem Renaissance poem Langston Hughes, What happens to a dream deferred?

Dream Deferred (Harlem)

By Langston Hughes

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?

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Traducido al español:

¿Qué le pasa a un sueño postergado?

¿Se seca
como una pasa al sol?
¿O supura, como una llaga,
y luego corre?
¿Apesta como la carne podrida?
¿O se endurece y se azucara, como un jarabe dulce?

Tal vez solo se hunde
como una carga pesada.

¿O explota?"

Langston Hughes may have had racism in mind when he wrote a poem that asks this: “What is the price of postponing human dreams or aspirations?”

Langston Hughes was a leader of an artistic movement called the Harlem Renaissance. That’s the name for an era that witnessed a flowering or blossoming of the arts among African Americans. Its heyday was the 1920s and early 1930s. Scholars disagree on when exactly it started and ended.

The short poem implies it is tragic and possibly dangerous if dreams are set aside or delayed. Readers don't have to give it a racial interpretation. It is about any kind of dream being put off or unfulfilled.

Today's young people have dreams or goals or activities put off due to a Covid pandemic, and they feel very frustrated. The poem is about that.

HERE IS AN IMITATION:

Tree Recycled (Mulch)
By Tim Gracyk

What happens to an abandoned Christmas tree?

Does it blow down the road
like a tumbleweed?
Or does it take root somewhere--
And then go to seed?
Does it call to birds to build a nest?
Or fling its spiky cones at cars--
like a foul pest?

Maybe it just haunts
like a ghost.

Or is it tossed into a pile of compost?

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"Dream Deferred (Harlem)" Harlem Renaissance poem Langston Hughes, What happens to a dream deferred?