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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 has been dead nearly as many years

As that girl lived. And of this circumstance

There is nothing to say at all,

Its silence silences.

76 thoughts on “A Photograph by Shirley Toulson”

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