September

Scotland is entering its twilight months. Like an old ragged bear she is creeping into the darkness to go to sleep. Year on year it's the same: the once familiar places that were filled with children's laughter and the brightness of summer take on new shapes and turn somehow different. All that was known becomes a little stranger. It's still September, and there is length to the evenings, but come early November and the return of the mists, days are sometimes barely lit at all. I love this place, this strange and wonderful land, because it's a perfect cave for the imagination.


ENOUGH

Out of the scurry of the days
A place of late sunlight, and the sky
Swimming into blue unclouded;
The trees held in a bonfire of the last sun.

Enough to wait here by the wood's edge
And let the things still hurrying to be done
Fall silent, as the first stars
Vague the orange of the far-off west.


(From the collection Coracle, published in London by SPCK).

Father

It's Sunday as I write and today, as on many days, I think about my father. Perhaps it's because the day is sombre: Highland Perthshire is quiet - almost as if the birds themselves know it's a Sunday. The leaves are beginning to turn from their summer green and the rowan berries are in bright clutches outside my study window. I have just returned from the mad rush of southern Germany to all this quiet, and it is made more evident in the wake of such constant noise.

I didn't really have a great relationship with my father - not until after he was gone. When I was a young boy we kept missing each other; that's how I like to describe it now. By that I mean that the things we said and wanted to say kept on being misunderstood, misheard. Afterwards I thought it was almost as if we were somehow standing talking and not quite hearing what the other said. And then he was suddenly gone. I had grown up with older parents, and I was blessed to have him so long.

It was only after his death that I began to write poems for him, about him, about us. I never imagined that such poems would come to the pen (and that is the great thing about poems, you can't know truly predict them ahead of time). Perhaps my subconscious was working through some of the things that weren't dealt with on this side. All I know is that they brought comfort, and even understanding. When I think of him now I see him laughing, with a face full of laughter. Not mocking, just happy.

This poem, from my collection 'Coracle', is one of the last of such pieces to be written.


A Kind of Coming Back

Sometimes I imagine the phone ringing in the night -
That worst of all nightmares - and staggering out
Into the darkness of the hall. My small voice
Asking the question - afraid, white, far away -
My father answering, ten years dead, as though
Nothing at all had happened. Asking me how I am
As in the old days, when I came home from university,
When he put down his pen in the study and turned
That half-smile on his face. I'm fine
I whisper now, ghostly, into the nothingness of the night -
Knowing this cannot be, this is impossible.
I'm glad, he says, serious at last, as though he means it,
And puts the phone down, leaving the humming nothing
Of that no man's land between the worlds.

Iona

I try to visit Iona every year and this year I won't make it. Iona is my spiritual home: this tiny island on the edge of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where the monk Columba arrived with Christianity all these hundreds of years back. It's much bigger inside than outside, if that makes any sense. On the map it looks nothing: a gnarled pebble-shape at the end of the island of Mull. But once you're there, distances lose all meaning. It can take half a day to reach the south-western tip of the island. What I love more than anything is becoming nothing on Iona. On a wild day in October you are fighting the wind every step of the way. And all you are, all you have achieved, all that you think is important about you, is somehow blown out of you and away.

That matters to me as a writer as much as anything else. There is a very real danger of becoming self-conscious about the whole process of writing - poems in particular - and I find they happen these days when I am least conscious of the whole thought of writing. Poems should happen; they shouldn't be worried out of the pen. And on Iona they happen most often that way, and it means the world.

A few weeks back, my newest book of fragment poems was published by Wild Goose in Glasgow. All the poems in its pages are nearly Haikus: they are three-lined meditations on the island and on my long association with Iona. A Wee Book of Iona Poems should be there to find via Amazon: I hope it will be in the fullness of time. Or contact me and I'll send on a signed copy: info@kennethsteven.co.uk


A gannet
made of faith
gimlets the sea


The last ferry's gone -
a drawbridge has been lifted
and the island left behind.


Sometimes
it's about little more
than a boat on a blue sea.