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?

• A line from this Langston Hughes poem became the title of Lorraine Hansberry's play.
• "Or does it explode?" is the title of a chapter from Howard Zinn's bestselling book, A People's History of the United States.

WHAT MAKES HUGHES POEM IMPORTANT?

Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" exhibits how powerful subject matter can produce what Ezra Pound defines poetry as being "news that stays news".   The poem begins by questioning, "What happens to a dream differed?" (1).   This draws on an incredibly loaded topic, the black experience of the American Dream.   The poem questions the position of an oppressed people and the subject has remained topical ever since the 1930s when Hughes wrote the poem.   The poem does not define what exactly the "dream" is: is it economic equality, respect, dignity or forty acres and a mule?   Thirty years after the publication of Hughes' poem in a speech illustrative of the impact of Hughes question, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined what the "dream" is.   A "raisin in the sun" is a charged simile.   It's one of the most powerful images in Black Literature.   Lorraine Hansberry used this line as the title of her play about the black experience in America, which shows how powerful the image remained for generations after Hughes.   Normally one would expect a grape to be left in the sun in order to produce a raisin.   Here the raisin, an object already drained, is left in the sun.   The image brings to mind slavery and sharecropping institutions that forced blacks to work in the fields under the sun.   "Or does it explode?" the last line of the poem is charged with meaning for a blacks for years after Hughes' death.   It was meaningful for the blacks beaten and terrorized as they went on "freedom rides", bus trips from the South to Washington D.C. to demand equality; for the SNCC; for the blacks attacked by police in Birmingham, Alabama during the sixties and for all blacks facing inequality today.   Hughes poem is news that has stayed current for almost eighty years.