A humorous poem to enjoy for Mother's Day...

I was just enjoying the reading of this poem on the tv and thought I would share for Mother's Day. If you want to see the poet read it, it is on youtube.


The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.



No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.


I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.


She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light


and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.


Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth


that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

Thank you Ansuya...I am glad you enjoyed this.

I think that the weaving of lanyards (aka boondoggle) is a national pastime (at least in bygone years) of American schoolchildren. You had the round ones, the flat ones, the skinny ones, and the square ones. I remember inflicting these jewels upon my parents and my grandmother after a day's toiling at summer church school. After my father's death, I found a "keychain" that I had fabricated out of dark green and white, the flat weave with a cheap little hook at the end, two inches of glory with unfinished ends sticking out one end....lovingly secreted in my dad's desk.