Exploration Two from Amanda

Hello, my name is Amanda Kessler and I am currently a freshman.  I live in Dublin, Ohio, but was born in Canton, Ohio.  I am the youngest of three girls in my family.  My oldest sister, Hillary, recently graduated from Ohio University and my older sister, Allison, is a junior at Ohio State.  My father went to Ohio State as well and my mother went to Walsh University.  I am interested in healthcare, so my major right now is nursing, but that may change as I am unsure if that is truly what I want to do in the future.  My fun fact is that I played basketball for most of my life, up until recently.  I started playing basketball when I was around five years old and decided to stop playing after I graduated high school to focus more on school.

This is a picture from my junior year of high school basketball season when we had just beaten a team for the first time in Jerome history.

The poem I am responding to is The Lanyard.  In the beginning, the sarcasm of this poem did not stand out to me at all, so I was confused as to what the author was talking about.  Once we listened to the audio of the actual author, I understood the sarcasm.The two phrases that stood out to me were "She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard".  These two lines stood out to me the most because as we said in class, you truly cannot repay your mother for giving life to you, but he chose a simple object to try to repay his mother.  I generally liked this poem because it was easy to read and understand once clarified when the author read it himself.