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

Transient for Short