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.