The lanyard

My favorite poem, thus far, is "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins. Here is the line I love best:

"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."

Yeah. That's pretty much how it goes. I look forward to handprint turkeys and refrigerator worthy spelling tests as a testament to my daughter's great respect and affection for me.

On a side note, Alice now enjoys clenching objects in her teeth and roaming the house with her prize. Usually it is a ring shaped toy, giving her a passing resemblance to Ferdinand the Bull. Today however, as Tony washed his hands for dinner Alice slipped into the entryway, stood up to her full height (2ft+), took Tony's wallet from it's resting place next to his keys, and put it in her mouth.

Then the little bandit crawled away with her purloined treasure safely locked between her two thieving baby teeth and her accomplice gums.


Here is the poem above in it's entirety:

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.