Tonight's Poet Corner: The Creativity of Childhood

The Creativity of Childhood
by Belinda Roddie

We built our own mini-Stonehenge
in our eucalyptus-littered backyard,
each stone a mark of mystery
that only we knew the solution to.

We ate roast beef sandwiches
with peanut butter, making bets
as to who would retch first, or who
would beat the other to the sink to
spit out a gooey mouthful. If we
could both finish, we treated ourselves
to the ice cream bars that my father
thought he was good at hiding from us.

And when it got close to bedtime,
we told each other stories in order
to stay awake for as long as possible,
so we could make as many wishes
as we could think of on the rare
shooting stars that left cosmic paint
on the canvas of the endless sky.
Above our heads were the mysteries

that we only dreamed of knowing
the solutions to. We wanted to be
druids, chefs, and astronauts. Building,
creating, and exploring all at once, the terrain
sculpted from our own idiosyncrasies,
a smudge of each of us remaining for future
eucalyptus-littered backyard dwellers
to pause at and wonder about.