poem.txt

Stanza 1:
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.

Stanza 2:
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.

Stanza 3:
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.