The Best Mother's Day Poem EVER WRITTEN... Is This One.

As I wrote earlier this week, this Sunday, we celebrate the women who carried us in their wombs for nine months, pushed us out through some painful delivery procedure, and then dealt with our shit (literally and figuratively) for the next however many years.

Here's one of my favorite poems ever, written by Billy Collins, that I like to read every Mother's Day. Maybe this year, you can share it with your mother. 

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.

-- Billy Collins

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For more amazingness, check out Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space (hearing him is a completely different experience from simply reading him) or Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems.