To those displayed our wobbly papier-mache pencil holders on their desks

 Katy Gordon writes: Here are two poems in honor of Mother’s Day.

The first poem offers a humorous look at the insight we gain as adults at the sacrifices our mothers made to bring us into the world and nurture us. Who has not done as the speaker of the poem here does - present our mothers with badly crafted gifts a camp counselor or teacher coaxed us into creating? (The popsicle-stick pencil jar? the inexplicable Plaster of Paris plate? My mother, being a saint, managed to look delighted every time we presented her with another non-functional pot holder we'd woven from tiny nylon strips, the kind of potholder that magnified the heat of any pan and left a singed plastic reek in its wake. I suspect she still has them tucked away somewhere).

The second poem is more serious tone and looks at those lessons our mothers give us in how to behave - those unspoken lessons that are revealed through their example: “Never go to someone's house empty-handed. Whatever you do, make yourself useful.”

Happy Mother's Day to all those who have nurtured us, comforted us, and displayed our wobbly papier-mache pencil holders on their desks!

 

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.

What I Learned From My Mother

By Julia Kasdorf

 

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.