At the workshops, I enjoyed attempting to describe ‘the indescribable’. I realised that just by trying to write about a mystery is enough of a process to turn a handle (or a page), toward the direction of yet another mystery.

During the first workshop our group was given an opportunity to speak about our religious or non-religious lives, our early spiritual upbringings and how many of us, over the years had strayed from whatever faith-based religions we once grew up with. I was curious to hear how other folk, later in their lives, had realised and accepted varying conversions to different organised faiths.

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INVENTION

Invenio – I discover (I think!).
I think.  I discover.

Discovery joins old notions in new ways.
I put things together.  I am a joiner

Of words.  What shall I make?
The world has enough chairs, tables, timetables.

I can put myself together with this time, this place,
A quiet Thursday evening in the Old Town:

With this house full of books, I suspect, full
Of joined-up writing,

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“I was raised on a farm, in the Punjab,
where death and life were accompanied
with the utterance of Allahu Akbar.
Each day and each season’s harvest
was an expression of Gods’ grace.”

This is a quote from my most recent poem titled “Faith with doubt,” which I wrote specifically in preparation for my workshop. The idea of a divine creator was as natural and as real as breathing for me. This was re-inforced even more when I studied Physics at Sheffield University in 1984 when a friend handed me a copy of the Bible.

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Poetry is made of language and we live, and move, and have our being in language. Our thoughts, our hopes, our loves, and our faiths are expressed in language. But none of us are truly monoglot; our words and concepts are borrowed from other languages and dialects and as we travel and experience other cultures and faiths, we constantly translate ourselves into and out of other languages and traditions.

Poems are like this. I think of a poem as a made thing, an invention, from the Latin invenio, which means to both invent and discover. In writing a poem,

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