It's Mom Time!

Reading this poem won't hurt, but it might make you cry. POEM by BILLY COLLINS, DRAWINGS by DOROTHY MOORE'S SON

MY BOOK-GROUP PAL LISA sent me a Billy Collins poem (below) to honor the women who brought us into this world, and worked even harder to ensure that we would live long enough to abandon them as teens. Sigh. That’s a tough job, and my mom did it four times, persevering all the way through Son #4. I’m grateful for that, because #4 was me. Thanks for that, Dorothy Habel Moore, and may you rest in peace. You certainly deserve a break.

The summer of my ninth year post-birth, I went off to Camp Teepee, in Newtown, Connecticut. During arts and crafts, I was encouraged to pick up plastic strips we called “gimp” and weave them into a bracelet for my mom. It was blue and red, and it was on her bedside table when she died at age 97. As Billy Collins points out below, she may have felt that it was a kind of recompense for all she did for me. As an adult, I thanked her a thousand times for loving me into existence, but was that enough gratitude? Only a thousand?

More translations of “mom” here. And you can even buy flowers!

1,001: Thank you for bringing me into this world, Mom, and for showing me what a beautiful place it could be.

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The Lanyard

BY 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.

“The Lanyard” from The Trouble With Poetry: and Other Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” —Calvin Trillin

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