A Photograph

                            “POEM”
                        A PHOTOGRAPH

     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.