Journal Five - Haily Simeral

 Haily Simeral

English 1109 10:30am M-W

October 6th, 2020

                                                            Journal Five:

    My favorite poem that we read is, "The Lanyard". I don't typically read poems but after the ones, we listened to in class, and how much meaning they have, I think I'm going to look into them a bit more. The Lanyard specifically stuck out to me because of the tone I thought of myself. Before listening to the poem in class, and reading it out loud to myself, the attitude of the poem I grabbed was gratitude. It seems weird knowing what it means now but, reading it the first time, made me feel the child was trying to give something to the level of things his mother gave him. My favorite line from the poem was towards the end when Billy Collins wrote, "Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world". This sentence makes me realize that our Mothers gave us life and gave us all these gifts and souls to run the world with, and take on our lives by storm. And we can never fully repay our mothers for this but we try to with our childish gifts that mean the world to them and we don't realize it until you see the happiness on their faces. My favorite word in this poem was 'worthless' from the second to last sentence when Collins wrote, "that this worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even". I love the word useless in this form because think about it, we make simple things in school as kids and we give them to our Mothers, or family members not thinking it will mean something with such significance, and in my perspective, it lights up their entire world. 

    The chapter in The House on Mango Street that really got me to be emotional and kept my eyes glued to the book was, "The Monkey Garden". Although there were a lot of chapters that I could've used, I picked this one. I think Cisneros wrote it very well. I loved how in the chapter, you can feel Ezperenzas' betrayal and how badly she was hurt by her "friend". All she was trying to do was help protect her friend and stand up to the boys she was around. My active reading is quite all over the place in this book, It touches on Ezperenza wanted to die and that she tried to one day. How she was embarrassed after she thought Sally needed to be saved, and that she felt sad and almost alone. My favorite line from this chapter is definitely on page 97-98, "I wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails". I just felt her pain and depression and all I wanted to do was jump into the book and just hug her and tell her life is going to be okay. And I love it when a book is able to give me that emotion. 

This is my version of The Lanyard. I wrote my Mother a book for Mother's Day in elementary school, and it was just for a small project I think my teacher made us write, and it was just a picture I had to color and write about what my Mother does to make my life special. I took it home to her and I showed it to her and it made my Mother cry and to this day, she keeps it in her desk and cherishes it every day. It just shows what our little gifts, our Lanyards, mean to our Mothers.