Do you know this poem?
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!
I found it particularly relevant today in school as we talked about, well, loads of confluent things. Like masks in our actual lives, on our actual faces. Like Lord of the Flies, where Jack learns to paint his face and suddenly behaves differently. Like in Wonder, where Auggie is so excited by the idea of Halloween, where he’s finally masked and nobody is staring at him.
I’m also reading (listening to, in fact, and WOW on the audio recording) All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and the Dunbar poem feels even more appropriate. It’s just kind of a big confluence today. Everything leans in. Everything presses together to suggest that we all experience some of the same things.
Life is full of these confluences when I’m paying attention.