Imagining Things

https://www.ionabooks.com/west.html
The poem below from my new collection 'West' takes its title from the wonderfully evocatively named beach on Iona. Every time I return the experience is the same: profoundly spiritual, profoundly life-changing. But the picture is actually from Columba's Bay - the place where the saint landed all those centuries ago.
THE BAY AT THE BACK OF THE OCEAN
... I come back here brittle and broken, to be washed up new and rinsed and clean, with eyes that no longer see the clutter of what must be done.
To be made pure west again on days the sea's moiling and searching, roaring over beaches in chariots, beneath the battlefield of the skies.
Then when the light comes, sometimes, shimmering like a whole shoal of herring, and the wind stands still, I think - this is to fill the heart.
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https://www.ionabooks.com/west.html
This sonnet from 'West', my new collection of poems published by Wild Goose Publications here in Scotland, was composed one night when I couldn't sleep. I felt bowed down by the news of a world where everything beautiful and precious seemed under threat. I felt useless in the face of the destruction, and all too aware of a clutch of world leaders concerned with their own power and status. Yet despair is what we must not do: we must always l...ight candles rather than curse the darkness. I now know that 'West' is available in America too. Please look for it; please share the poem.
DESPITE THE DARK
Sometimes it is not strange to think that God is out behind the darkness of the night; that there is hope, however small and odd that thought might be. Sometimes it is all right believing that the good will yet win out against the weight of hate, and that the light will shine again when all the voices doubt and you have fought the dark with all your might. Lift up your hand and see its grace anew and open wide the window to the dawn to hear the birds that sing the morning in. For this is still a thousand times more true than fear and lies and giving in to wrong. So keep your faith - believe, begin again.
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https://www.ionabooks.com/west.html
This poem is also from my latest collection 'West' published by Wild Goose Publications. 'Journey' was penned one afternoon when I was in residence at Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers outside Edinburgh. It seemed to be born out of silence: no talk is allowed at the castle during the day to allow words to flow without disturbance. Please share the poem further.
JOURNEY
... I have gone into a landscape not to come back different but more myself. It can take days to go into the hills and listen.
Everything is miles of silence: a stretch of loch so blue it can't be real, an eagle floating in the sky, at night the skies a breath of stars.
I leave behind my loudness for a time; remember what it means to swim again, to feel way out of my depth.
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https://www.ionabooks.com/west.html
This is the title poem of my collection 'West', dedicated to my sister Helen. Below is a picture of us in her beloved Sutherland in north-west Scotland: all the pictures in the book were taken by Kristina Hayward, my partner. Please share the poem further; please follow my work.
MY SISTER HELEN
... She was Scotland to me: bedtime stories that woke me to the history of Wallace and Bruce, would have had me up in a saddle, galloping back in time for the bits of the border we'd lost.
She lived down endless long windings of bumps, in cottages with attics and owls - the hope of conkers in the morning.
She drove me one August night when the skies were orange and bruised, till the storm was flickering booms and we came home in silvering rain.
She was drives at high speed down roads that should have closed long ago, in cars that were held together by the hope of a better tomorrow.
She could conjure a whole ceilidh out of a candle and an old bothy; she was songs and tin whistles in the middle of the worst of blizzards.
She was a beach where you could always swim, and a place you'd not known before; she was a fire that would set you alight - an adventure that was yet to be planned.
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https://www.ionabooks.com/west.html
This latest collection of my poems, 'West', has just been published by Wild Goose Publications of the Iona Community. It's dedicated to the memory of my dear sister Helen: I always describe her as the youngest person I ever knew. This is just one of the poems from the collection, and in my mind it's describing Iona, the island that was of such importance to us both.
SALT
... When you have forgotten what it means to have the wind hurrying your window all night long it's time to find the island. There is a gate - beyond, a track that's made of sand winding down the machair. You'll hear the sea long before you're there, or the shoulders of the island have opened so that all the horses of the west are galloping the beach, again and now again. And if you should open too and let in light, it is because the breakages within you are so many, and the salt, no matter how it hurts, will heal.
If you would like a signed copy of the book, please send me an email: info@kennethsteven.co.uk Please share the poem; please follow my post.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evensong-Poems-K ennet…/…/0281064806
This comes from my collection 'Evensong', published by SPCK in London. Please follow my post; please share the poem with others.
DAFFODILS
... When the year is beginning again, The sleet coming in wet cotton on the wind To build against the dykes; And sometimes the sun like a single eye Blind behind the clouds; And daffodils, the frail green of them, Hidden away and hurting in the wind - I am no longer full of my own emptiness But just light and sky, listening, And able to hear at last.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Collected -Poem…/…/0715209094
As I remember my mother's life, and give thanks for it, I remember one of the greatest gifts bestowed on me in childhood: the Hebrides. I literally counted the days to be away from the inland countryside where I was growing up (beautiful though it was), to be back in the west and all that meant. This is what I think it meant:
HEBRIDES
... This shattered place, this place of fragments, a play of wind and sea and light, shifting always, becoming and diminishing; out of nowhere the full brightness of morning blown away, buried and lost.
And yet, if you have faith, if you wait long enough, there will be the miracle of an otter turning water into somersaults; the jet blackness of a loch brought back to life by the sudden touch of sun.
But you will take nothing home with you save your own changedness, and this wind that will waken you - sometimes, all your life, yearning to return.
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BROKENNESS LETTING IN LIGHT
I'm writing today to remember my mother who's died at the age of 93. Many years ago she 'found' the island of Iona and it became her spiritual home (as it has, much later on, become mine). There was no greater joy in childhood than going to St Columba's Bay (where once the saint landed from Ireland) to make a fire on the beach and search for green stones. I will forever see my mother sitting on that beach sifting through piles of stones in the hope... of finding one piece of treasure. The poem comes from my book 'Iona the other Island'.
A little cave of green stone smoothed by centuries of sea to a pebble small as a pinkie nail chanced up out of the waves' reach.
Hold it to light and it changes becomes a globe of fractures; a cavern of ledges and glinting, not one green but many at once.
And suddenly I think of it bigger as the whole of the human heart; carrying the cuts of its journey - brokenness letting in light.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coracle-Poems-Ke nnet…/…/0281072094/
This poem comes from a winter before temperatures had begun to soar and sink from one day to the next with the effects of climate change. It comes from my collection 'Coracle' and the story happened just as I relate it. Please follow my post; please share my work.
... TWO WRENS DEAD
Fifteen below, A whole foot of snow Crystalled and glinting.
All winter eight of them, snub-tailed Inch in under the eaves, Cuddle against the cold.
This winter just too big - Day after day of deep ice, The sky made of strange marble.
I found them. Beaks like twigs: Eyes glazed and gone, Their light put out for ever.
How little did they weigh, And yet, all day I held them Heavy in my heart.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evensong-Poems-K ennet…/…/0281064806
This poem from my collection 'Evensong' seeks to convey something of the courage of the so-called papar hermits (whose story I sought to re-imagine more fully through my sequence of poems 'A Song among the Stones'.)
The papar were hermit monks in the days of the Celtic Christian church. For them islands like Iona became too busy for the hearing of the voice of God: they had to travel ever further north to the wilde...st and most barren of island landfalls for their listening. All they needed was fresh water. There is a pun in the poem's title: the word in Gaelic means 'light'.
SOLACE
I look back through my mind and see The days when forest wolved the land in mystery And light was cradled out of coracles In wild and wintered island storm.
All night and every night the rip and snarl of wind, And this their task alone, to guard the light they had been given - The flutter of that single flame Keeping out the whole world of the dark.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/COLUMBA-Poems-Ke nneth…/…/0715208225
A long number of years ago I was lent a house in Penzance in Cornwall for a month of writing. A gift indeed. The kind owners were to be away for that time on holiday: they knew of my need for solitude for inspiration to write. The truth is I didn't write nearly as much as I should have done: but the month there in Cornwall was special just the same. And one wild January day I took the bus from Penzance inland to get... a sense of that older Celtic world.
PENWITH
Nothing in the world could prepare you for a January like this - Penzance huddled in a corner, its flags at half-mast, The yachts in the harbour clinking and rocking In the huge grey beast of the wind.
But inland, something else is here beside The broken walls of the tin mines, the inked miles of strangeness That wade into moorland on the edge of the sky That has no trees, that has no heart.
The colourless of the land shudders - The sun has been washed into the sea. The only light Lies in the lions that roar and roar Over the huge gold of Porthcurno's sands.
Except at Crean, for a moment, when something lifted and I looked - A fistful of goldfinches burst like flowers From the magic of the air and promised Resurrection, a second chance.
As ever, please follow my post; please share my work.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Collected -Poem…/…/0715209094
This late winter poem was written when I was living and writing in western Norway. I had the privilege of staying on the farm of a good friend who ended up translating a volume of my selected poems into Norwegian (and doing so most beautifully). This poem simply describes a real day on that farm and the sadness of a still-born calf.
The poem comes from 'Island', the only hardback volume of my poetry produced to dat...e. It contains my best-known nature and Celtic Christian work from some 20 years of writing. Please follow my post; please share my work.
CALF
Born with everything but breath He slid into the world a month too soon.
The trees traced with snow, the farm white-roofed, Even the tractor buried useless.
The far mountains gullied white, Lost under an avalanche of cloud.
And the calf nothing more than a flow of soft water, Eyes thin against the light.
Carried like a slack brown sack Out over the crackling field.
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https://www.amazon.ca/Ice-Kenneth-Steven- ebook/dp/B00I79H48M
I wrote 'The Ice' several years ago: it was published first in America and nominated for a Pushcart. The story went on to be partially dramatised for radio by the BBC.
I had written the story many times before because what I sought to do was exorcise the memories of ten years of bullying at the school I'd attended in Highland Perthshire. But always my story became too self-indulgent, more about myself than the main... character.
I was fascinated by a most beautiful old house close to where I lived at that time in Perthshire. The house lay on the shores of a little lake, and under great ramparts of hills. On the far side of the lake was an island. Whenever I walked there (and I went back and back to see it many times) I wondered what it would have been like to grow up there and to know and explore that lake.
That was the breakthrough. I set my story here: my main character had gone to boarding school and the awfulness of his first term there. Now, after months of bullying, he had come back to the kind of winter he had dreamed of all his life. His grandmother had said that he could go over to the little island on the lake where there was a small cabin to spend Christmas there with his brother and cousin. And so begins the most magical Christmas he has ever known, as the frost lasts two whole weeks and at last they can walk out over the ice to the cabin.
The story's to be found on Kindle below, and appears in my collection of selected stories 'Winter Tales' from SPCK. As ever, please follow my post; please share my work.
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It's a privilege to share poems in particular from past collections (and, as on this occasion, from a new work about to appear in print). I'm asking that as readers of this post you might be good enough to seek out some of my books online, and to share these with others. The easiest way to order books is through my website: www.kennethsteven.co.uk Everything is listed there. Volumes of poems like 'Evensong', 'Salt and Light' and 'Iona', from which I've often taken individ...ual poems to share on Facebook. My most comprehensive volume of poems 'Second Nature' is to be found, along with a good number of other works, on Kindle. I particularly hope that more readers may find my volume of selected short stories 'Winter Tales' (a work on Kindle at very little cost). Please share word of this with Facebook friends - and thank you.
THE DEER
Only now I think how they came down that morning through the dark to stand and watch my going after eight years there; the careful eyes, the heads bent forwards, and I remembered then the winters I went out to feed the furry mouths - those frozen months when nothing broke the ground but snow and still more snow, the earth like stone; when they slipped soft and shy from out the wood and anything I found I fed them with my hands. That dawn I think they knew that I was going for good; it was as though they came to say some strange farewell.
From 'West', the new collection of poems appearing soon from Wild Goose Publishing here in Scotland.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coracle-Poems-Ke nnet…/…/0281072094/
GLENDALOUGH
The ghost of the mist lifting... From a sea folding over in silk.
In the night a flicker of snow, The final breathing of winter -
But down in the nooks of the rocks Yellow petals and bright spires.
In darkness the monk comes out Soundless from the cell where he sleeps
Crouches in the lee of the boulders, Holds open the bowl of his hands
So deep and nestled in prayer He never knows the blackbird's circling
And when he wakens from the world of his God, The day fierce with the spines of the sunlight
She lies warm in his woven fingers The eggs kept there under her softness.
How long he held there who knows, For the story is older than stone
But the annals say that he waited Till the young birds flew up to the sky -
And if the shards of the telling are true And the rest just the spinning of legend
It is bigger than we can believe.
A re-spinning of the beautiful story of St Kevin from the south-east of Ireland. I first learned of the tale thanks to the pen of Seamus Heaney. I have married the text with a further picture from St Columba's Bay on Iona. Please share the poem; please follow my post.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evensong-Poems-K ennet…/…/0281064806
This poem was written one Sunday afternoon. I know that because it was inspired by the sermon I'd heard in church earlier that day - for once I was listening.
A BASKET OF WATER
... The boy came back from school in tatters - A March day; snow thin in all the hills, A blue wind breezing the sun Wild across hillsides, and sweeping it away. The boy saw nothing; he had told a lie - The teacher had belted his hands until they bled. I want to be good, he told his grandfather, But it never lasts. I always have to start again. The old man ruffled his hair. Take the coal basket, Go down to the river and fill it - But hurry, run for all you're worth. The boy went, the basket thumping the backs of his legs, Fled down the hill, wind grazing his face - Plunged the basket deep, swirled sky water upwards, Rushed with it splaying, up and up the hill, So it gushed and splashed, hopeless. He came back with an emptiness that shone - The words in his eyes spoke dark. The old man knelt beside him: It wasn't useless. Look at the inside of the basket; The coal dust's gone, it's washed away. Just the same with you. Put good things Deep in the heart. They'll bleed away, But the light they give is always left behind.
The poem comes from my collection 'Evensong' published by SPCK. Please follow my post; please share my work.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Collected -Poem…/…/0715209094
LAMB
I found a lamb, ... tugged by the guyropes of the wind, trying so hard to get up.
It was no more than a trembling bundle - a bag of bones and wet wool, a voice made of crying, like a child's.
What a beginning, what a fall, to be born on the edge of the world between the sea and America.
Lamb, out of this island of stone yellow is coming, golden promises - the buttery sunlight of spring.
Hammered out on the computer today as the prevailing winds bring in wave after wave of rain. The lambs are still to be born, but the spring will always follow winter. Please follow my post; please share my work.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evensong-Poems-K ennet…/…/0281064806
THAW
Seven weeks of frost. A fist gripped ... the fields and woods in thick ice. The lochs were the eyes of dead fish, white and pale and glazed. Each night I thudded out new logs; we lit a fire that dragoned in the hearth. Around us in vast skies the stars glittered and another settling of flakes ghosted the trees each morning.
Seven weeks of white, until today, and a wild wind riding the hills; green so green the eyes cannot believe. All of the winter gone, slid into the streams that babble and chatter with the joy of thaw.
How little we know of the strings that hold us Intricate in space and time.
A poem from my collection 'Evensong' published by SPCK. As ever, please follow my post; please share my work.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Collected -Poem…/…/0715209094
This was written a few years back as a response to 'The Journey of the Magi' by TS Eliot - hence the opening line.
THE JOURNEY
... That is not what I remember: for me the dark watchfulness of strangers, the tiredness of towns full of their own emptiness, the desire to keep our journey secret as our gifts.
The morning we arrived I smelled oranges in the fields; the sun rose through the mist in a disc of gold, and a blind man sang all alone in the middle of the nowhere of the streets.
They were asleep too when we came; one dusty beam of sun lancing the floor - they were a painting already, their story frozen in the stone of legend - stranger than itself, yet made of nothing but its own simplicity.
We had thought God above all this and we were wrong. We went home confused, following no star, wondering where we were going. I lay at night seeing the eyeless socket of the moon, watching the vast emptiness of the dark, unblinking. It was in the beggars, the sore emptiness of hunger in the homes we passed, I saw my own blindness.
That was the beginning of the journey.
Good wishes to all those reading this on the last day of the year. As ever, please follow my post and share my work.
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One of the most evocative writers I’ve had the pleasure to meet. Delighted Imagining Things is primed and ready to share more writing with more people.