| 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. |