Every English teacher knows: Before starting “A Raisin in the Sun,” teach “Harlem.” The poem, as epigraph, greets the reader in the play’s earliest pages. It’s the type I like to spend time on; the metaphors are accessible, the message resonant.

We read it a few times. Silently, and maybe too quickly, before I ask someone to read aloud. We all listen to Langston Hughes’ questions:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore —

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over —

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The only word my students, my lovelies, don’t know is “deferred.” I explain — “Like how you defer getting out of bed for as long as you can” — then we submerge ourselves in Hughes’ short stanzas, the remainder of his language sieging our senses. Someone mimics gagging over festered sores; I move my fingers as if they’re sticky from a syrupy sweet. We speculate. Why does Hughes italicize the last line, the one about exploding?

It doesn’t take long — I knew it wouldn’t — for my lovelies to mention the dangers of their own deferred dreams. The regrets they hope to avoid. Their belief that lives will be brighter if they push, propel. Persist.

When the conversation pauses, I offer my own life as an example. “Yeah, I mean, I love being your teacher. You know that. But I have other dreams I definitely haven’t achieved.” I quote from the poem — the line toward the end — not only to model using textual evidence, but because Hughes’ words are just right. “Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load.”

“What dreams you mean, Ms. Graham?”

I don’t know why I didn’t expect her question; good teaching means anticipating what will confuse your students, what will make them curious.

My daily burden, which I lug with me from home to school and back home again, weighs on me even now. I almost feel my shoulders ache. I’ve carried this for so long.

“I want to be a writer.”

I say it because my lovelies have been brave, and they make me want to be, too. I say it because the other people I love already know this about me. I say it because it’s true.

Hearing this, another lovely tilts his head to the side. “Ms. Graham, why aren’t you a writer?” he asks.

It’s another question I should’ve known was coming — but I didn’t, and I don’t have an answer. I pretend not to hear.

kerry.graham@thebaltimorebanner.com