The downdraft in these houses stole our words
and raced them up the chimney
till every conversation turned into an absurd
contest with the elements where all that could be heard
was the constant spit and rattle of our throats,
sounds and splutters where we learned to tease
out the meaning of one another’s thoughts.
Soon we learned to do so much more than that.
In smoke, we practised semaphore, waved flags
through mist to tell our neighbours complex jokes
and stories. Philosophers and thinkers were invoked.
Whether Rousseau was correct when he spoke
of the ‘Noble Savage’. (Some blowhole bragged
he had us in mind with our prehensile toes.
Others claimed we’d long been spoiled by those
who gave us houses.) A moot point, some accepted,
before moving onto Kierkegaard or Freud,
Darwin whom we utterly rejected, Hegel, Marx,
(whose material dialectic one of us enjoyed
and would bring daily to the Parliament,
arguing for the social ownership of birds
before we set out to hunt them in the dark.)
Yet most of all, we studied Calvin – his Manichean view
appealed most at our fireside, for we could see no shade of white
within the homes we occupied. No source of light
other than God-given. We pondered the few
words by which we knew him before coming to decide
there was no thinker like him, seeing the clarity of his thought
when we stepped out from peat-smoke
and saw the steady brilliance that shone for us outside.