It’s National Poetry Month

It’s National Poetry Month!  …ok.  I guess it’s an acquired taste.  I know when you mention poetry in some circles, it creates some unease as people recall their childhood and having to get up in front of their 4th or 5th grade class and stutter through "I think that I shall never see…"

I remember in college, taking the various and sundry English classes required for a Theater/Liberal Studies major, the various writing exercises involving poetry in its various forms.  I was always fascinated by the students who could write and present their thoughts so freely and lyrically.  I was too rigid, still am, though I am trying to loosen up.  It’s weird; too, because I can do a monologue, no problem.  Call it a poem… rigid! 

I stayed in a hotel recently while visiting my kids down south.  Usually, I stay with them and sleep on the couch.  They have a one-bedroom apartment right now, but the living room is fairly large and the couch is comfortable.  It was a three day weekend, though, and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.  Besides, I like hotel rooms, for the most part.  It’s fun to call the front desk and ask for a wake up call, to use up all the towels and leave the bed unmade in the morning, only to come back in the evening and find everything back in place, bed made, towels fresh.  I’m a channel surfer also in hotel rooms.  The hotels usually have the premium cable networks that I don’t have at home, so I look for movies and programs that I don’t normally see at home.  That was the case one evening after I got back to the room.  It was late, but I was awake so I started surfing.  I came across “Def Poetry” on HBO and intrigued by the name and being familiar with Mos Def, I decided to watch.  I was enthralled by the performances.  I was aware of poetry slams, but had never ever attended one or watched one.  I so liked one of the performers called Asia that I found his MySpace and downloaded the work he presented on the show.  It’s called “The Waiting Hour” and is about his bout with testicular cancer, of all topics.  Powerful. 

With that fresh in my memory, I then had the opportunity to write on my experience prayer walking through San Francisco this last month.  I posted my attempts to document the day in an earlier post.  And, with all the awareness and experience I have recently acquired, I can say it is now National Poetry Month!  …ok. 

I read this poem on the Reformissionary blog last week.  He’d posted it shortly before his mother died and then also said that he read it at her funeral.  I remember being surprised and choked up at the ending.  I then thought of my daughter, soon to give birth to my grandson and thought of him someday sitting by a lake making a lanyard for his mom.

"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.