A Photograph

By Shirley Toulson

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 sea, which appears to have changed less,

Washed their terribly 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 this circumstance

 There is nothing to say at all.

 Its silence silences.

Paddling

पानी में पैर मारना 

तैरने

Transient

अस्थायी (asthai), क्षणिक (kshanik), चलायमान (chalaayamaan), and अनित्य (anity). 

 lasting for only a short time;

THEME

Our days captured in still pictures have the power to once again evoke smiles and tears of the past. A search for the lost happiness in photographs is uplifting and saddening, both at the same time. Wha would not want to relive the days when the friends and family were together and days passed by without a worry. But after the momentary happiness, the present only pinches more as the void after their departure makes itself felt harder.

The poet here presents a poignant scene of the rush of memories felt when she looks at her mother's smiling picture from before she was born. The smile was heartening but poles apart from her morose expression later in life. If not in reality, the poet got the warm comfort of her smile through the photograph,

Through the poem, we realize the essential worth of a picture, and how memories of the past prove a fuel for future life.