Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, July 28th, 2020.

Today's poem is by William James Collins, an American poet who is otherwise known as Billy Collins.

He was born in March of 1941, and he was the poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.

He is, of course, one of the most beloved and best-selling poets

of our time. And the poem that I'm going to read today is called The Lanyard. I want to give credit

to the writer Karen Swallow Pryor, who shared this at a conference recently, but I wanted to

read it to you and share it with you, but I did want to give her credit for reminding me that this poem

exists.

So this is 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 facecloths 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. Here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor.

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