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 mothers's, that was before I was born. and the sea, which appears to have changed less, wished 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 up for the beach.'The sea holiday was her past, mine is her laughter.Both wry with the laboured ease of loss. Now she's beee dead nearly as many years, as that girl lived.And of this circu mstance there is nothing to say at all. Its silence silences.