The cardboard shows me how it was
When the two girl cousins went paddling,
Each one holding one of my mother's hands,
And she the big girl --- some twelve years or so.
All three stood still to smile through their hair
At the uncle with the camera. A sweet face,
My mother's, that was before I was born.
And the see, which appears to have changed less,
Washed their terriably transient feet.

Some twenty --- thirty --- years later
She'd laugh at the snapshot. "See Betty
And Dolly." she'd say, "and look how they
Dressed us for the beach." The sea holiday
Was her past, mine is her laughter. Both wry
With the laboured ease of loss.

Now she's been dead nearly as many years
As that girl lived. And of his circumstance
There is noting to say at all.
Its silence silences.


-----------------------------------------------------Shirley Toulson