NaPoWriMo  Day 17 without a prompt.   A constant in everyone’s life is the ability to dream. In your sleep and in your waking time. But what do we do when that dream is unfulfilled – stopped dead in its tracks?  Sometimes by a conscious choice, sometimes by circumstances that present themselves, wanted or not. 

The Framed Dream

It was a short notice: Helen is predeceased by Bud
and Charles Gruenwald Jr, her husband and son.
God knows, she’d lived the last eight years
impatiently waiting to join them.

It moved with her when she was left alone.
An eight by ten picture from a 1930s
Life Magazine: young nurse in white cap
surrounded by glowing light.

Her nurses training lasted six months.
Instead of earning a nurse’s pin
she eloped and eight months later
put my brother to her breast.

The room was empty when I took it down.
Water-stained backing, script barely readable
My dearest Helen, No one can take this away
from you. Sister Everista 1937   For sixty years,
she’d kept her dream in a plastic frame.