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| Source: The Guardian |
...Two among the penultimate poems had what I thought, at first, an accidental connection. Each poem is introduced by someone for whom the poem touched and one of the poems in introduced by director J.J. Abrams, one of the few Americans in the que. He chose a Billy Collins piece, titled The Lanyard.
There is a link on this YouTube page for more of him. Go!!!! Poems are meant to be heard and to hear its author give them their reading...priceless.
Bumped up next to this poem in my book is one by Victoria Redel.
What is interesting is that the person who chose it for the anthology was Billy Collins; the he from above. This view of the relationship between mother and son is no less compelling.
BEDECKED | VICTORIA REDEL
Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.
He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.
Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a
boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.
Then tell me it’s fine - really - maybe even a good thing - a boy
who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in
the park.
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.
He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.
Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a
boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.
Then tell me it’s fine - really - maybe even a good thing - a boy
who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in
the park.
Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means -
this way or that - but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows - made every
shining true color.
Now try to tell me - man or woman - your heart was ever once
that brave.
Love it. Reminds me of a certain boy who liked to play dress up with his friend.
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