How am I creative? What an excellent question. My creativity takes several forms, poetry, song writing, writing novels, non-fiction theology, cooking, baking, and playing.

The Many Rooms

Within my house, the rooms are wide
And in each one,a craft resides.
Not one true door,but many ways
To spend the solitary days.

In one, the air is thick with word,
Where metaphor, a startled bird,
Is coaxed to land upon a line
And make a common thought divine.
Here poetry in measured breath
Confronts the silence after death,
Or paints a sky in hues of sound
Upon a page of hallowed ground.

Next door, a melody is spun
Beneath a weak, consenting sun.
A simple thread of hummed design
Winds round a feeling, hard to sign,
Until it finds a lyric’s hook
In some deep,half-remembered book,
And makes asong the air can hold
A story sung, not merely told.

A hall extends, a longer space
For patientnovels to find their place.
Here characters with urgent feet
Pace out their dramas,bitter-sweet.
I furnish them with motive, flaw,
And map the contours of their law,
Then watch them turn and break the mold
Of all the stories I first told.

And in a study, clear and stark,
A different, disciplined theology spark.
To trace the arc of sacred thought,
With logic careful,dearly bought,
To parse thenon-fiction of belief
And wrestle with a silent Chief
This too is making, born of need,
To plant a conceptual seed.

But see the warmest, scented air
That drifts and cradles everywhere?
The kitchen is an alchemist’s keep,
Where waking dreams are stirred from sleep.
Tobake is prophecy in flour
To grant a sweetness to the hour.
To cook is bravery with spice,
A sacrifice of precise slice,
Creating grace to be consumed,
From humble gifts that once lay bloomed.

And last, the room with scattered toys,
The pure,unburdened, simple joys
Of play, the root of all the rest,
The first and most important test.
To build a world from sticks and thought,
To chase the visions freely caught,
Is where the ancient fountain flows
And every budding artist goes.

So ask me not if I create,
But which is my current gate.
The hands that shape a rising loaf
Are sisters to the mind aloof
That crafts a verse or builds a creed.
From the same wild,internal seed
Grows all this branching,tangled art,
One beating, curious, maker’s heart.