Sometimes when I see a wad of money,
half an inch of twenties,
old bills, folded and straightened,
smelling of tobacco and palm grease,
I think of the cash my father showed me
when I was young, when we moved off the farm
and the ponies had to be sold, even mine.
The money was so small, so inert.
I think he wanted me to hold it,
to accept the diploma of adulthood.
A letter came later, a photo — my pony
with her first foal, brown and white,
a baffled look on its face. Neither of them
will have lived this long; the money, too,
passed by now through a thousand hands.