Deferred

In general I'm not a huge poetry fan.  My taste normally runs along the lines of Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, and Dr. Seuss.  I might be able to get into Robert Frost if I ever sat down and truly tried to read him, but I haven't so far.  There were a few other poems I was required to read in high school that occasionally come to mind and I usually appreciate the poems that Avis writes, but as I mentioned I'm not an avid fan.  I (almost) always dislike poetry that doesn't rhyme.

Sometimes at work "issues" come up in the products that we make that could barely be called issues or are considered minor.  Either the customer will never notice or we have reason to believe the things we have observed in our testing will never occur in real life.  Of course there are major issues that we do fix, but the really minor ones we enter into the "issue tracking" system and then defer them to a future quality update project or something like that.

In my opinion, the word defer is not one commonly used in general conversation unless you're deferring the answer of a question to someone else.  It just seems like a unique word, and it always reminds me of that one poem we read in high school that was written by a black writer during the civil rights struggle last century.  I mentioned this word association that always pops into my head to another guy at work, and we were joking about our issue tracking system causing riots because of the issues we have deferred.  Engineers are nerds.  Anyways, that's how this poem came to mind.

A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes

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?