We Should Have Taken Better Care of Him

Paul Laurence Dunbar and Byron Herbert Reece - two poets who both died young, suffered with tuberculosis and struggled to achieve time for their craft with so much of their energy necessarily spent simply earning money to live.

Today I recognized the similarity while reading a short biography of Dunbar. Occasionally you will hear someone say, "If you could sit down and talk with anyone from the past who would you choose?" I want to speak with Paul Laurence Dunbar; better yet, I want to meet with him and James Weldon Johnson together (they were friends). I would love to be a fly on the wall while they conversed.

It is said verse literally flowed from Dunbar. He wrote:

"I do not believe that a young man, whose soul is turbulent with a message which should be given to the world through the pulpit or the press, should shut his mouth and shoe horses."

How many messages from Reece and Dunbar and so many others have gone unheard? I like to think a time will come when the import of unspoken yearnings and unfulfilled achievements will be realized.

Many are familiar with Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This is the full poem the title comes from, written by Dunbar entitled, "Sympathy."

I am grateful he chose to speak the turbulence of his soul though he died at the age of thirty-three. We should have taken better care of him.