For those interested in the minutiae of creativity, I'll mention that the following poem incorporates all twenty words on one of my son's third-grade spelling lists.

Trouble

Dawn Potter

From the barren hills a battery of men

marched and stumbled onto the muddy plain,

but the wolves, impatient for spring, mistook them

for scrawny oxen and devoured them. Now the women,

no longer the wives of heroes, hoard turnips and spoiled loaves.

Mice gnaw the empty shelves, grind their yellow teeth

against the split handles of knives and hatchets.

Children launch greening potatoes at the anxious

cattle; they throttle the last angry geese. Pale sheep wander

the bleak forest like ragged deer, tearing twigs and blackened

leaves from the stunted oaks. A sallow pair of lambs huddles

by the half-thawed pool, where a single ancient fish lives out

his cloudy hours, calm, unfixed, a pitcher of silver and lead.

At dusk he drifts into the net.

[forthcoming in How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)].