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For Grace,
My Granite Girl

We may have lost the Old Man of the Mountain in 2003, but (as this poem’s speaker claims) New Hampshire’s people remain granite at our core.  Place can be defined by its physicality – like the rocks commonly found there – and we are certainly often defined by our place; sometimes even more so than by our lineage.      

For Grace, My Granite Girl

My grandmothers were of rock

foreign to me, but what I think of

as the porous island rock

that has held up Ireland

and the Azores for centuries.

My mother was of

Rhode Island schist,

a confounding combination

of strength and fragility,

friable layers of a complex whole.

But me  ~   I am of granite.

Simple, strong, and solid,

speckled and graying,

but with a few streaks

of blushing pink to quarry.

New Hampshire hard and hearty

from the endless elemental extremes

of the land that made me.

I endure.

                             — Tammi Truax

"For Grace, My Granite Girl” copyright 2007 by Tammi Truax.   Tammi is a fulltime mother and freelance writer who resides in Portsmouth. As this poem implies she can be a real block head. — Lesley Kimball

Please note: Poems submitted to this column should not exceed nineteen lines.