Direction: Read the given poem and answer the questions that follow by selecting the most appropriate option.

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 labored 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.

-Shirley Toulson

Q:

What is the meaning of the line “Both wry with the labored ease of loss”?

• 1
  Poet’s laugh has gone now.
• 2
  Poet’s mother is no more now.
• 3
  Poet’s holiday is a past now.
• 4
  Poet’s mother has stopped laughing now.