Unmethodical discourse at a café table
By the flickering candlelight
of the long evenings,
inimical to study so they said
they played this game
to while away the time
between learning and authority
in that Jesuit college
in the early 1600s:
blindfolded or simply shut-eye and don’t cheat
you turn the pages of the Latin dictionary at random
and stick a pin, in turn, upon a random word;
the first to make a sentence
in the fewest rounds, the fewest words, wins
a prize of choice..
we do not know the prize
(among those severe, repressed, ambitious
boys, perhaps it’s just as well…)
or what the others drew;
but this we know: that night
René pricked a first word – ‘sum’ – ah! -
promising! a verb was useful, in this game—
the second round… he pricked on ‘ergo’…
that swift mind already playing the tables
of his agile mind…
the air was tense; they’d remember
this night, this flickering light,
forever in their future lives…
a hush (how boys fight to win
more fiercely than Christ’s soldiers,
whom they would become…)
‘Cogito’! A shout of triumph
from our René – and the rest
is history – alas..
It’s said the Devil enters in
at the third stroke; and so it was:
in three words, a lifetime’s career
as the greatest of divines
in an age of awe for the divine
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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