Remote

A few days ago I had to phone to arrange the delivery of a parcel. I went through the usual long-winded process we have all become so used to: I pressed numerous numbers and keys before finally being able to speak to an advisor - my original intention. I wasn't properly thinking about anything expect the delivery of that parcel: the person I spoke to was simply someone who might be able to ease what was becoming a laborious process. Yet it was as though all at once I listened to what he said and saw the person he was appearing in front of me. He had asked me for my postcode; my postcode in this corner of Highland Perthshire in Scotland.

'So you're lucky enough to live in a remote place?' he asked, and it wasn't envy I heard in his voice so much as sadness. Of course he had gone beyond his remit: all he had to do was establish where I lived and arrange the delivery. Yet I heard the real sadness in his voice all the same, and how could I start to blame him for that?

'Yes,' I admitted, thinking about it, remembering it. 'Yes, I do live in a remote place.'

On three sides of me forest; a woodland full of deer and most likely pine martens and even one or two of the last Scottish wildcats. Almost every day the king of the woods, the greater spotted woodpecker, landing at the feeder so I could watch him for perhaps ten minutes, never ceasing to admire that crimson crown at the back of his head. And not long ago three jays with their magnificent blue wings feeding on the lawn underneath where that king of the woods would feed. Yes, I thought, I live in a remote and priceless place, and all too often I forget and simply grumble about the long walk to the village, and the lack of proper refuse collections.

I thought of that man stuck somewhere in a call centre in the south-east of England, and realised he might never have known what remoteness really meant. Nor experience it in his life.


A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIGHT

To climb out of the known
into the moorland's empty miles;
where sun and shadow meet
and the only elements the ones
that first began this world:
wind and water, rock and light.

You crouch beside the loch,
out of the bullying of the breeze -
and nothing might have changed
since the beginning;
a smear of brightness smiles the water,
before going back to grey.

Somewhere unseen the sadness of a bird -
a single song in the hugeness of the sky,
and suddenly you know you do not matter
here beyond the normal and the everyday,
the old enslavement of the hours -

you have escaped to breathe
a different kind of light.


(From Kenneth Steven's forthcoming collection Letting in the Light from SPCK, London, due Summer 2016)

The Birth of the Foal

The Birth of the Foal


My eyes still fought with sleep. Out over the fields
Mist lay in grey folds, from vague somewheres
Curlews rose up with thin trails of crying. Our lanterns
Rocked in soft globes of yellow, our feet
Slushed through the early morning thickness of the grass.

She lay on her side, exhausted by her long night;
The hot smell of flanks and head and breath
Ghosted from her spread length.
Sunlight cracked from the broken yolk of the skies,
Ruptured the hills, spangled our eyes and blinded us,
Flooded the pale glows of our lanterns.

There he lay in a pool of his own wetness:
Four long spindles scrabbling, the bigness of his head, a bag of a body -
All struggling to find one another, to join up, to glue
Into the single flow of a birthright. He fought
For the first air of his life, noised like a child.

His mother, still raw and torn from the scar of his birth,
Turned, and her eyes held him -
The great harsh softness of her tongue stilled his struggle.

We knelt in the wet grass, dumbed
By a miracle, by something bigger than the sun.


The poem is published in the collection Wild Horses, and in Kenneth Steven's volume of selected poems, Island - both from Saint Andrew Press.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk