Response to Poem

One of the poems that we read in class, that I found very interesting, was the Harlem poem by Langston Hughes. What I really admired about this poem, was the simplicity, yet details in this poem.
The first line of the poem, Hughes writes a simple question. "What happens to a dream deferred?". What I really like about this line, is the fact that it opens up the poem, in such a simple way, but enough to grab a reader (me) into the poem. The way he sets up this question, like when I first read it, I didn't know what deferred meant. So it really bugged me what deferred meant, and if it would be important and relevant to the poem. The meaning of deferred was to postpone; delay. So basically by the end of all this, I realized what Hughes really wanted to say was, what happens to a dream left alone or abandoned.
The second stanza, Hughes refers to the dream, like a dried up rasin in the sun, or fester like a sore ,stink like meat, or like a syrupy sweet. When I first read that, I was at a complete baffle. I had no idea what he wanted to say. Then I realized that it was all a simile, because it said like after everything. I realized that the raisin in the sun stands for like the dream to just dry up, the stink like meat, that it just sucks and smells.
At the end of the poem, Hughes says "Or does it explode?" What I think he ment by that, was that does it just go away? Or just start popping up other dreams. Or does it crush you? This poem really is a brain twister (I have no clue if that makes sense) but thats what I think Langston Hughes wanted to do. He wanted to challenge our brain, to really think about a dream and what happens to it.