LBI Poets Studio

Whether you are an accomplished poet or a new one, our monthly workshop will inspire you. To attend this virtual event please contact Sue Cummings via email scummings817@comcast.net.

This group meets the 1st Thursday of every month from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm on Zoom. You may also join the program in-person at the LBI Library in the meeting room each month.

Our Prompt for May is to write a poem that takes "mother" as it's theme...perhaps... a mother, your mother, all mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers...mother-in-laws, mother's in fiction, mother's in fact, mothers-to-be, mothers as metaphor, mother ships, mother lands, mother loads....infamous mothers... or perhaps an epistolary poem (a letter) to or from a mother...(real or fictional/living or dead)

As a Bonus Challenge use three or more of the following words selected at random from Niall William's novel, History of the Rain.

amiss, lilts, mythological, summertime, do-lallies, eyebrow-growers, trail, voiceover, sleep, presence, notable, blackbirds, aspire, pupil, camels, locker, throat-singing, infantry, flaming, butterfly-fluttering, hauling, praying, peppermint, mattress, pouted, hummed, conspiratorial, half-winged, shin-high, whaling, low-slung, Virgil, supernatural, dialogue, napkin, whimsical, out-of-date, skirts, candle, billowing, pink, epiphany, wings, nod, ferried, trotting, wainscoting, coagulate, sleeplessness, glob, chicken-pox nights

Here's a wee bit of inspiration:

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.

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