POTP Mini-Challenge Week: 1 - Exploring a Poem

Poets on the Page

The beginning of this poetry challenge is for you to choose a poem and tell us why or rather what it is about it that you love. After you have accomplished the above write a poem in the same style as the poem you explore. 

 Barbara Ras's poem "You Can't Have it All" spoke to me the first time I heard it. I was attending the North Coast Redwoods Writers' Conference. For me, this poem is a reminder to be grateful for the sweet things and dear folks in my life. Sure, things may not have turned out exactly as I'd dreamed, but the life I've created is rich and full and rewarding.I enjoy the peacefulness that this poem brings to me, I like the repetition, too.
 

You Can't Have It All (Excerpted) Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled… You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border.   You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender… And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this.   http://poemhunter.com/poem/you-can-t-have-it-all/ You Can't Have it All  Annis Cassells But you can have the wide canvas hammock strung between two trees like a ship out to sea on your grandparents’ hillside. You can have the giggles of babies, daughters and nieces, sharing a tub overflowing with toys and bubbles. You can have Topsail sunrises and Morro Rock sunsets. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and get the very thing you thought you ordered. You can’t have June and Ward Cleaver, but you can have your dad walking through the house wearing only shaving cream and boxers and your mom, head in hands, wondering what to have for dinner. You can have fifty years’ worth of the first day of school. You can have the Mediterranean breeze playfully brushing your breasts on a topless beach in Nice. You can have the hum of a motorcycle and the expanse of the open road beckoning you to follow your passion for new places.  And you can have the open arms of loved ones to firmly enfold you as you arrive and depart. You can’t turn back the clock, but you can reconnect with a childhood friend and feel 45 years in between dissolve into timelessness. You can have the dream, the dream of a wooden dance floor in Barcelona, and you in costume, dancing the Flamenco. You can have arm-in-arm beach walks, crossword puzzles, the mist off Niagara Falls, games of hide-and-seek, and fireflies in quart jars. And when adulthood fails you and you think that no one cares, you can still call forth the memory of the moment when your father’s unexpected expression of tenderness and love warmed your teen-aged heart and how your mother was always home to listen when you came in from school. There is the voice you can still summon from your depths; it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.