Common Coin

I remember my dad used to … tell people that he gave the Old Man a shave and a haircut.”
- David Nielsen, official caretaker, son of Neils:
“The Old Man Behind the Old Man” (Concord Monitor, 1/1/99)

Shave and a haircut, two bits. Profilius
looks mighty fine on the coin’s state side:
shored up, spit-shined—in mint condition
you might say—for today’s unveiling.

But even gussied up, the quarter’s still
a common coin, clinking in the pockets
of poor and rich alike, a coin with which
to buy time for a load or two of laundry,

time in the parking meter’s monitor
of our comings and goings, time enough
to sip a take-out coffee, phone a friend.
Though time is—as they say—money,

it’s time we never get enough of and
no minted coin’s more valuable than that.
Still, this Old Man’s granite visage—sculpted
from a rock-hard, rock-ribbed history,

tempered in the kilns of summer fire
and winter ice—is now, to coin a phrase,
coin of New Hampshire’s realm, and as such,
(in service to the general welfare) well spent here!

Marie Harris
August 7, 2000

Marie Harris of Barrington, NH has worked as a resident artist in public and private schools throughout New England for 25 years. She is the author of four books of poetry and two children’s books. Harris served as Poet Laureate of NH from 1999 to 2004.

Cowgirls

I watched the calves suckle their mothers. After a summer
loose in the heifers’ pasture, they fattened all winter

in the barn and were bred. My grandfather Wesley teased me
for the names of girls I was sweet on at school: He named

a Holstein for Marsha, who did somersaults in kindergarten.
“I see London, I see France, I see Marsha’s underpants.”

Annually the tie-up extended to Mary Beth, Dottie Page
—black and white spotted monsters of milk and manure—

Nancy, Elizabeth, and Phyllis Rebecca Gordon, so
beautiful in the sixth grade I could barely look her way.

- Donald Hall

Donald Hall of Wilmot, NH has received a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project. Hall served as Poet Laureate of NH from 1984 to 1989.  In June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s 14th  Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.