This is a wonderful and fitting poem for these rocks. Even though Dunbar lived in another time and may have been expressing the pain black Americans were experiencing when emancipation was supposed to be the whole answer to their suffering, he is still relevant. In 2020, there was such a ragged divide between those willing to wear masks for others, and those refusing to wear masks, that this poem spoke to me in a different way than he may have intended. After you read the poem 4 times, please continue down and notice the rocks I painted that reflect my siblings and masks. And as I’ve mentioned before, rocks help me write so ‘Thank you’ Mr. Dunbar for writing this poem, and thank you reader for reading the poem and my blog and noting the connection.
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence. Dunbar, "“We Wear the Mask.”" from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, )
Ray Kids
Cheryl, Diane, Brian, Richard, Leslie
In a span of only six years there were begat five children to Edward and Adele Ray. In general, these children played nice and grew up with love and respect for one another for the first half century of their lives; then, along came Donald Trump and Covid and first signs of real trouble between them.
I am the youngest, and I have been trying to write about the painful change in our sibling relationships, but I have failed. I wrote plenty, then erased it. Rewrote, and deleted. I’ve never had so much trouble expressing a thing. So I’m just going to let Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem
"We wear the Mask" express the depth of the pain.
But I will say three facts I am confident of:
At one point, my brother Richard pointed out that within our group of five siblings, we reflected the US divide, that three out of five Americans supported the Covid measures being taken, while the other two out of five did not. But we will be ok.
We have different ideas about what fair, right, and good mean, and we have had a rough time these past few years. But we will be ok.
In 2020, I painted these rocks in a bit of an emotional storm and it shows. But we will be ok.
