The Dream Deferred
By Nafisa Rashid
The great Langston Hughes once talked of dreams deferred
The type of dreams that are not preferred
In the eyes of a young child, eyes that glisten with a dream, shining brightly in the distance,
This child ran endlessly chasing this dream, despite compounding resistance
Soon the child’s eyes begin to dull, when their bejeweled, shining dream seems to become
further out of reach
Like a star in the night sky, dazzling but clearly impossible to grasp from the earth, despite its
entrancing sparkle from that one reflective night on the beach
Years passed and this dream shimmered, flashed, and dulled over time
Seemingly never within hold, like its distance was meant to be a punishment for the wisher, as if
they had committed an unspeakable crime
Despite the dimming of this dream, they are like a fly drawn to its light by instinct
Even as this dreamer grew older, the dream would not end, its length not succinct
Running and chasing it to the point of being out of breath,
Spending late nights and early mornings trying to grasp this dream before its death
Why do you keep struggling and fighting for a dream out of reach, a dream constantly pushed
out of your reach the more you try?
To the point where each night when the dream fell further away, you yelled in your mind that
you were the reason that this dream was unattainable? Why, why?
What is a dream, a dream deferred and kept out of reach and out of sight?
A tempting and fatal light,
That one reaches for with all their might
An endless journey, a fight
Though it seems like it will never come, like it will always be postponed, deferred, it’s YOUR
dream, no matter how it has been shaped, reshaped, transformed, right?
It may have stunk, crusted over and maybe exploded, but still you desire to taste it, even if it is
not the same as the beginning dream, in the state you would have originally preferred.
Because sometimes there’s nothing wrong and nothing bad about a dream in waiting, a dream
deferred.
Nafisa Rashid ‘23 reflects on the emotional ups and downs and paths of longtime desired dreams that have been deferred and out of reach from before and during her time as a college student. From the February 2023 issue.