All-Billy Birthday Extravaganza!

Welcome, all!  This week for Poetry Friday--thanks to the popular suggestion of Linda Mitchell at Mary Lee Hahn's blog last week, all who care to are posting a favorite Billy Collins poem (or Billy-inspired original.  March happens to be his birthday month--the great man turns 76 on March 22.  Leave your links here starting at 8pm, Early Birds!

I thought to challenge myself by finding a BC number that might actually appropriate for kids, unlike the one being famously recited (you know I had to post it) by this wee acolyte at the altar of words:

But I haven't found a satisfactory one, so I'm going with this one, dear to the heart of mothers and former sleep-away campers) everywhere.


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 archaic 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. 

from The Trouble with Poetry (2005)

I'm hoping to have time to put together a "Golden Spine" poem--as you can certainly guess, that's a poem made of the stacked titles of another poet's poems, in tribute to their genius.

In the meantime, the InLinkz froggy will help you hop from Billypad to Billypad, and I pledge to eventually make it to each and every post this weekend.  Thanks for stopping by!

An InLinkz Link-up