Dream

 After reading the poems of Langston Hughes, Sherman Alexie, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, the only two words that kept popping in my head was lies and dream. Interestingly enough, each author has a different ethnicity, but at the same time, they all are minorities in this country. Every one of them describes with such sorrow how has this country has failed them by lying to not only them but everyone and robbing them from their dreams. Even though they all write in different styles, some of the words they use to describe the way they live or feel interlock each other. I notice that the poems talk about dreams, and they use the word “blood.” In Langston Hughes’s poem, he states, “Whose sweat and blood,” and Sherman Alexie says, “Our flag will be a white sheet stained with blood.”  For me, both these authors use these words to show how  America has shed so much innocent blood.

A word that I repeatedly saw through these poems is the word dream. I think that the phrase dream correlates with the way the authors felt lied too. I believe that every author felt that they were being lied to because they were being promised something unreachable.  For Hughes, it was the dream of being free and one day being able to be on the same level as the rest. To Baca, it was the longs of the “American Dream” the money and the houses.  On the other hand, Sherman is how Americans have lied to generations of what Christopher Columbus was and what he did.

From all these poems, the poem that I saw my self the most was the one of Langston Hughes Let American Be American Again. This poem speaks to everyone, not mattering their skin color or background. The way he describes the lives of the minorities and the things they go through it is mesmerizing.  A line that stood out to me the most was, “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” This line, to me, is personal because I have brothers and sisters who are dreamers. These mean that they are DACA recipients.  Daca receipts are “young people who have grown up as Americans, identify themselves as Americans, and many speak only English and have no memory of or connection with the country where they were born.” And like Hughes says, they are people who want to want to accomplish their dreams.