A Poem for Mother's Day

It reduced me to a mess of tears and laughter.

‘Mother and Child’, ca. 1962, by Rodney Burn

For Christmas one year, my brother gave my husband a book called Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. My husband has never shown the least bit of interest in poetry, but I suspect my brother was stumped for a gift and saw this at the bookstore. “Plus, I want to see if the title is true,” he added. My husband dutifully read a few of the poems, but I never saw him moved to tears.

Fast forward to last weekend, when I was reorganizing the bookshelves in the living room and came across this book. For some inexplicable reason, I took it into the kitchen and proceeded to flip through it while sipping a cup of peppermint tea. The house was silent, my children asleep upstairs, so I sat uninterrupted.

The layout was interesting—100 famous modern-day men contributing the poems “that move them,” along with a brief description of why. I skimmed, more curious to see who had contributed to the anthology than I was about the poems themselves, until wham, one of the poems hit me like a freight train, and I found myself reading it through several times, alternately laughing and crying. And by the time the roughly 5-minute episode finished, there was a pile of wet Kleenex beside me, and I felt lighter, drained, and faintly euphoric.

I want to share the poem with readers because this weekend is Mother’s Day (I didn’t actually know until a friendly lady asked yesterday if I had any plans; I do not), and the poem that hit me like a freight train is about how impossible it is for a child to repay or even comprehend the gift of life and love that a mother bestows upon them. It is both humorous and heart-wrenching at the same time, as you’ll see.

It was selected for the anthology by J.J. Abrams, the American film director and composer, who said poetry never “came easy” to him, except once:

Years ago, listening to NPR on my car radio, I heard Billy Collins (at the time our country’s Poet Laureate) recite one of his poems entitled ‘The Lanyard.’ It gripped me in a way that poetry never had before. It was funny. It was relatable and profound and as I was driving down Washington Boulevard I had tears in my eyes.

Well, it had the same effect on me, and I wonder if it might do the same for you.

“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.

More Fitting Posts for Mother’s Day:

• What Is the Point of Having Kids?

• We Do We Parent For?

• What Is the Purpose of Childhood?

• Memento Mori: This is all we get

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