Reflections by Rabbi Karen Martin
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.
It’s incredible to me the way memory works. Sometimes, I feel like my memory has more in common with Swiss cheese than a steel trap. Words won’t be where I need them, or I’ll remember every detail of a conversation, including where we were standing or sitting, but the name of my conversation partner eludes me. And yet, when I encountered this poem in When We See You Again by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, it felt like being teleported back in time. For Rachel, it was back to her own camp summers and the night she shared this poem with Hersh, who was killed after 328 days in captivity after being taken on October 7, 2023. For me, it was back to January of my senior year of high school, when my dad took me to the Key West Literary Festival to hear Billy Collins share his work. I read several of his books of poetry that year and was so excited to meet one of my literary icons.
Aspects of that trip came rushing back. Getting a hug from Billy Collins was pretty cool, but more poignant was the memory of how loudly my dad snored and how he would collect stories from everyone he encountered on the street. We shared a love of poetry and language. To borrow Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s language, he was my person.
Collins is a master of drawing out the deeply poignant in what might otherwise be seen as the painfully mundane. My kids have brought home myriad lanyards in different colors and states of completion. They litter their rooms and seem to spontaneously spawn in the backseat of my car. While these are not usually gifts, my younger son loves to draw pictures of hearts on whatever paper he can find and proudly presents them to me as a token of his love.
Goldberg-Polin zeros in on the last stanza of this poem, when Collins, as the speaker, confesses that in his youthful naïveté, he believed the gift of a lanyard (made with help and mostly out of boredom) was enough to repay all that his mother had given and done for him. He confesses this from a distance, no longer the child he was, and with this new perspective, no longer able to say the words to his mother.
Goldberg-Polin answers from the mother’s perspective:
I know how Hersh repaid me. He stayed alive and let me fight for him. For 330 additional days after Death came to the door of the opposite-of-shelter bomb shelter. Hersh let me prove how much I loved him by letting me go into the arena to battle without training or armor, just with my tiny fists of primal love. He gave me hope that I could save him by wrestling with the world. He kept breathing so that I would be motivated; he kept me motivated so that I would keep breathing. I was, and I still am.
I find her answer beautiful and deeply moving, but I also struggled with it because I struggle with the idea of debt in loving relationships. My parents didn’t keep accounts. Only in jest did I ever hear, “I gave birth to you, so…!” Life, care, and love were and are to be given freely and generously. To the extent that love is an exchange, I find myself repaid when my older son leans on me to show his affection between one thing and the next, or when my little one hands me yet another paper heart and asks for cuddles while sitting on the couch. I pray they never lose their affectionate natures.
In many ways, that’s the crux of the poem. It’s not about repaying in any real sense. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment of how perspective changes. As kids, we don’t see all that our parents pour into us, all that love and care and energy and time and financial and emotional resources. With perspective, we can see and name the impossibility of repaying all that was given, even if it is too late. As a mother, Goldberg-Polin’s answer turns the expectation of repayment on its head. Hersh paid her back, so to speak, by being Hersh. By waking up each day, by giving her the opportunity to be his mother, to love him fiercely, that was all she needed. No bauble or lanyard was necessary. He was the gift. He wasn’t perfect, but he was perfectly Hersh, and that’s all she needed him to be.
There’s a story told of the Hasidic master Rabbi Zusya. On his deathbed, he said to his disciples, “In the world to come, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” I hear the echoes of The Lanyard and Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s response. As I watch my children grow and discover who they are, I pray that they don’t lose themselves in the world’s tempestuous winds. I cannot imagine the challenges they and their friends will face, or how they will change and grow. In Zusya’s story, God is like a parent, knowing that the world will be filled with trials. Zusya’s words remind us that what God wants from us is not perfection or conformity to some imagined ideal, but rather that we weather the storms of life and come through them—not unchanged, which would be impossible—but anchored by that which makes us who we are.
1Rachel Goldberg-Polin. When We See You Again (Random House: New York, 2026), 179.