Why is the Dunbar House closed?

Salman Rushdie has said, "A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." I don't know if Oscar Wilde would have agreed, but it is true that poetry can address rights and wrongs, joys and injustices in a way that prose cannot. The language of poetry can conjure up feelings that surprise us. It can be the knife which cuts right to the heart.

Here is a poem written almost one hundred years ago which does just that, by Dayton's own Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar was the first African American poet to be widely known and published. He died of tuberculosis in 1906 at the age of 34. The poem, I think, is best out loud.

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 overwise,
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!