April is National Poetry Month

In Memory of Dori Anderson
1938-2008

Tonight
David Smith-Ferri
Poet Laureate of Ukiah
will read at Mendocino College
7:30 p.m. in Room 5310

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month

Poem of the Day April 10th

First Day in Amman

Ahmed speaks

Amman, Jordan December, 2006
I want to show you something.
My left ear does not work
thanks to a car bomb,
and my right eye
thanks to a metal fragment lodged in its cornea.
Day and night, an echo of that explosion
rings in my ear –
not an ocean crashing or a river
carrying its musical load of rock and stone,
not a wind sighing or shrieking,
not two-year-old Abdullah calling from infested Baghdad,
but the voice of a bomb
in my ear,
and in my eye, one of its ten thousand teeth.

But that is not what I want to show you.
That is only the surface, moving downriver,
only a reflection of Baghdad today.
I want to show unchanging depths,
past, present, future bundled in the immutable
body of the river.

For that, you must look at my hand
and take it
and come with us to dinner
and eat shawarma.
Laugh with us.
Talk with us.
Think with us, habibi,
about how to extract the worm
eating the heart of my country.
TONIGHT! TONIGHT! TONIGHT!

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 10, 2008

BILLY COLLINS, The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly

off the pale blue walls of this room,

bouncing from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

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 more suddenly into the past –

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid 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 sickroom,

lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,

set 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 hands,

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.