Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Michael J. LaFrancis of Connecticut with a deeply moving poem, “What Happens When a Dream Comes to an End?” There comes a time when our homes, even if they are places we dreamed about in our youth and middle age, are no longer practical. Perhaps we are too remote, too far from family or health care. Perhaps the upkeep of house and grounds are too much, forcing us to downsize. In this poem, it is the seashore that has been a happy place for decades.
“My bride and I first came to vacation./ We fell in love walking on the sand bar,/ hand in hand with a sun-soaked sea breeze/ kissing our cheeks, dancing dunes,/ watching lobster boats come and go.”
In our modern Western culture we spend so much time and energy acquiring things and making a place for ourselves and so little time thinking about how we can stay happy and safe as we let those things go over time. We can get stuck, painfully so, in the most wonderful of dreams if we don’t learn how to detach from things that are no longer meant for us. This means going through a grieving process and moving on. Michael meets this sorrow with such frankness, poetic elegance, and dignity.
“I never thought about how this dream would end/ or checked the weather forecast for my heart.”
It isn’t only our homes we grieve. Similar feelings arise when we leave a job or finish a creative process. We may even experience them on a smaller scale when we finish reading a favorite book. Michael gives us permission to let those waves move through us, to acknowledge where we are and how we arrived here.
Read “What Happens When a Dream Comes to an End?” in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Michael J. LaFrancis is a dreamer, author, advocate, advisor and connector. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems appear in Amethyst Review, Avalon Literary Review, CT Bards, City Key, Friday Night Library, Mocking Owl, Northeast Coast, One Art, Last Leaves, Seraphic Review, Synkroniciti, and Orenaug MT.
He and his partner, Sharon, have two sons and were recently promoted to Nani and Popi for their two granddaughters. Michael and Sharon recently published their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They live in Windsor, CT.