I was told that all the firsts would be hard. Today is my first Mother’s Day without my mom. Billy Collins, in his poem “The Lanyard,” has captured my own feelings better than I could myself. In it he tells how, as a child, he’d thought that giving his mother a plastic lanyard he made at summer camp was a fair trade for the “breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world” that he’d received from her. The poem aches with joy and regret and wisdom and has been a comfort to me on this day when my thoughts of my mom are particularly strong. Here’s an excerpt:
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.
Other poems at Moss Kingdom about mothers:
Ballad of a Dog Lady, Exerpt from “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins, How ill a son returns his mother’s love: a poem on my birthday after realizing she will not call again, If you believe that deaths do come in threes, There are Moments that Poems are Unworthy Of, Deeper than her lungs could go: an Elegy for J35 and her pod, Tahlequah by Mark Hernberg