BerkShares

Lyrics

It’s not cotton-linen blend.
It feels like paper from a good book.
The ink is still new.
September, two thousand and six.
And here, in my hand, is a picture of Norman Rockwell.

In Great Barrington, the tellers learned a new math.
Ninety-five for a hundred.
The five percent isn't profit.
It’s the price of admission.
It's the cost of belief.
Handing over a federal thing for a local promise.
Susan Witt must have watched it happen.
The first exchange.
The rustle of a new agreement.

Oh, the beautiful smallness of the dream.
A currency that dies at the county line.
A kind of money that knows your name.
Its only power is the promise we make,
between the farmer's market and the hardware store.
This isn't for the world.
This is for here.

There’s W. E. B. Du Bois, looking out from a twenty.
Herman Melville on the fifty.
A quiet joke, placing J. P. Morgan on a note.
The titan of the other world, a ghost in ours.
Drawn by a neighbor.
Printed down the road.
This isn't a dead president from a far-off capitol.
It’s an ancestor. A local saint.

Oh, the beautiful smallness of the dream.
A currency that dies at the county line.
A kind of money that knows your name.
Its only power is the promise we make,
between the bakery and the public library.
This isn't for the world.
This is for here.

And someone asks, what is it worth?
It’s worth a loaf of bread at Berkshire Mountain Bakery.
It’s worth a book from The Bookloft.
It’s worth exactly what we say it is.
No more, no less.
An idea from the Schumacher Center, made real.
A handshake printed on paper.

Ninety-five for a hundred.
The sound of a community choosing itself.
A small, paper protest.
Held in the hand.
In the Berkshires.
Still dreaming.