Golden children

[vaneramos]

When I was fifteen Pappy and Mimi
gave me a gold Canadian hundred-dollar coin.
I don’t specifically remember
but every Christmas they gave the gift
of money we’d never use.

Now moving house
find it kept in a top drawer
separate from the basement box
of lesser coins
bestowed by ancestors
dead twenty and thirty years.

I open the display box
size of a wallet
brown leatherette embossed
with a brassy maple leaf
to see the clear metal inside.
I must at one time
have thought it beautiful
or valuable. It’s remarkable
to hold a hundred dollars the size of a loonie
in the palm, feel its abnormal weight,
like a disc of radioactivity.

The queen’s face is vaguely tarnished.
On the reverse,
six golden children dance
‘round a semblance of a globe
three dressed like girls
hems barely covering their thighs,
the boys’ clothing indistinct.
All spiral through golden
haze of light or space
to a new home in seventy-nine.

Children when my grandparents were old,
they will outlive me too.
I could keep and give them when I die,
even younger children to outlive.

I could betray the intention
sell at five times the original
for a month’s groceries
a weekend in Ottawa
or free space in my dresser
the size of a wallet.

~

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem about money.