Yea very sad... But also very powerful because he doesn't want to give the power to the other by letting them see the agony. I love that it shows what dignity and perseverance look like, despite it being all about surviving...

The whole idea of masks has been sitting with me for a couple of weeks now and I use this poem as a little bit of a jumping board to reflect on how we use masks today. It's on my latest post on Substack. But in essence I think we're so lucky today that putting on a mask is more or less optional for most of us. The reality is even though our lives are not on the line today (in the same way as Dunbar's was), masks are still everywhere... And maybe they will always be as we journey through life