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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.

In this blog I offer you heartfelt, homemade recordings of some of my favorite poems. I invite you also to spend time with their pulsing vibrations and pregnant pauses, to savor the luscious sensual syllables on your tongue, and to feel the subtle changes in your being as you play with the poems.

Listen, read and then slowly speak them out loud. The medicine of poetry will endlessly surprise and delight you as a portal into your own wild multidimensionality!

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The Lanyard

8/6/2023

 
This poem is in honor of Ezra, my second son,
who leaves home this week
​to make his own way in the world,
to follow his heart...

​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.

    - Billy Collins

Much more than even
so, SO much more than even...

this kid, his heart, my heart...
Go my wild sweet...held, beheld...
emerge with widened wings...

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​Two years ago my first son, Silas, left home. You can check out the Kahlil Gibran poem here:
www.guideforconscioushealing.com/wild-words-poetry-blog/lifes-longing-for-itself


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  • Home
  • Services
    • Mentor, Muse, Consultant
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
    • Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy
    • Breathwork Intensive
  • About
    • About Xochitl
    • Spiritual Midwifery
  • Cost & Connecting
  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea Cave Ceremonies