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.
~

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio a hundred and forty years ago today.

Despite racial and economic obstacles, and despite dying of tuberculosis (compounded by alcoholism) at age thirty-three, Dunbar published some two-dozen books — short stories, novels, plays, librettos, songs, as well as the more famous poetry.

At the turn of the century, this output elevated Dunbar to “poet laureate of the negro race,” and the literary scholars say that he was one of the very first black Americans to gain an international, biracial readership. 

The scholars also debate how many of those readers appreciated his full accomplishment, or even allowed his true voice.

Dunbar wrote in two distinctive and somewhat incompatible styles.

Much of his “plantation writing,” describing the sort of life his parents knew as Kentucky slaves, is in dialect — below, the first stanza of "Death Song," now inscribed on Dunbar’s gravestone:

Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass, 
Whah de branch'll go a-singin' as it pass 
An' w'en I's a-layin' low, 
I kin hyeah it as it go Singin', 


"Sleep, my honey, tek yo' res' at las'."


hmm....

Pakistani Wife

Updated post
29th JUN  ***HUMOUR***





Pakistani biwi sab kay samnay apney mian ko abay gadhay nahi kehti, 

 iss liyay in short order kehti hai A-G suntay ho?

_____________________________________
I hope the audience understood the funny joke


__________________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

VERY TRUE

Birds flying in the sky don't store their food nor do they die of hunger --i
On the other hand, human beings do store, yet they die of hunger.





 



A Distant Mystery

Much as the Devil would like me to believe otherwise, this isn’t somebody else’s head on my body in the picture. I have lived for real, a life of noisy dismay, good old days when I complained of a worldly disorder getting hold of everything around me, while at the same reveling in it.

I am now 70, an old man and a failed artist; looking back and failing to realize how I got here, failing to point down a single thread of destiny out of the unseen thousand and say this is what failure looks like, what leads most of us to it eventually.

Old age gives you plenty of hours of dreaming; sleeping or awake, it’s always a dream. I long for the days of disorder, the days when I could bring down the mountains; an angry artist doing things slap-bang, who once inspired to paint God Himself, fell down off his own vantage point, and never felt a thing.

Every living man was once a danger to everything that exists in this universe.

Darwaish

The Reply!

They eat different food…even their eating timings are different…hmm...

....breathing the different air...even their countries are different…

She is in muddy…hot…atmosphere while she don’t know at all how he describe his atmosphere…hmm…did she ever ask him…did he ever tell her?

All of it lay too deep for words.

They were neither brother and sister nor lovers.

But there are other ties….numinous ones….and of these they were aware.

There is a kind of consanguinity both closer and more powerful than that of twins in the mother’s womb. 

Life had melded their days and their nights….she knew the other’s depressions just as she knew the other’s dreams…passion…love…work.

Has he anything hidden from her?

And sitting miles away from him all she said. “hmm….very well,”

“Promise me you won’t get upset and will take care of yourself?”

“I promise” was his soft and docile reply.

hmmm

Though my heart says....

hmm....