Trump

Like many millions around the world, I watched the debate between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. What I was left with was a sense of numbness; effectively a disbelief. I couldn't quite believe what I had seen: a man who had known the worst week imaginable riding the storm and, in my opinion, being able to match his opponent blow for blow. And I reminded myself at the close of the programme that this dual was between a politician - of the highest standing - and a business tycoon.

I think that's what leaves me coldest. This man knows absolutely nothing about the running of a country; he is not qualified to run even a regional office in the smallest province. And yes, I have to admit that he was able to do something extraordinary on Sunday evening: he managed to counter Hilary Clinton time and again, and even leave the viewer with the sense that he might just have walked off victor. Had this been a boxing match; Trump might well have won on points.

All I know is that it would be the most disastrous thing, not only for the United States but for the world, if this man were to become president. It is Trump's views on global issues which frighten me far more than anything else; abhorrent and downright foolish as they are, his views on women - and treatment of women, are simply the unpleasant evidence of an unenlightened boor. It's his views on Muslims, on climate change (something he has tried to deny), on foreigners who happen to be non-Western per se, on torture - and I could add a good deal more - that frankly frighten me far, far more.

And I am left after Sunday night with the very real fear that this man might win. Perhaps as much and more because of a large swathe of American society who despise mainstream politics, who have despised Obama, who swallow greedily an empty rhetoric about making America great again. I am not saying that Hilary Clinton was no match for her opposite number, but the worst of it was that she came across as far too nice to him (and I use the word advisedly). After the week that Trump had had, the potential for a knock-out blow had been handed to her on a plate. And she failed to take it.

For the sake of an environment bleeding in every corner of our beautiful globe, for the sake of refugees fleeing the tyranny of regimes like Syria and Yemen, for the sake of the millions of underprivileged and forgotten poor in America's own states: don't allow this man to become President and take the world back a generation and more. It may require the swallowing of a bitter pill to vote for the alternative (and I think many understand that), but if ever there was a case of better the devil you know - then surely it's now.


www.kennethsteven.co.uk

St Kilda

The islands that make up St Kilda are treasures in the crown of Scotland. They are magnificent, whether seen from air or sea. Perhaps they are not beautiful; they are too composed of wild elements to be what we might ordinarily consider beautiful. I have had the privilege of visiting St Kilda many times, and of staying there. In 2005 I made a programme for BBC Radio on the story of the main island, Hirta, for it was 75 years since it was evacuated, its tiny population brought to the Scottish mainland. It may be that that programme, A Requiem for St Kilda, can still be found on the net.

I think that no visitor could fail to be humbled by the courage of that population in surviving on Hirta for all these hundreds of years. But the fact is that the people did not just survive, they thrived. The early accounts of visits to St Kilda make it clear that this was a group of folk who loved music and dance, who celebrated their island and their life on the edge of the world. What is clear is how utterly bereft they felt of their island home after 1930: one of the most poignant stories tells of a man who sailed out for years afterwards simply to see Hirta, the rock that had been his childhood home.

I thought about all this again when writing in my cabin a few days back. What came to me again was a sense of the fierceness of the wind, for we who live mainland lives can have little sense of the power of the wind out there in the middle of the North Atlantic. That was my journey in: what it meant to leave the full force of the wind behind. What it meant to come to somewhere that was silent.


THE ST KILDA WIND

A hundred miles west of sanity
St Kilda lies like the wreck of a dragon
crashed into Atlantic waves.

A few bones of bare rock, ungreened;
only a million seabirds wheeling the white stacks,
the air sweet with their stink.

Yet how many hundred years
a huddle of humanity clung to these rocks,
spindling the cliffs with their homemade ropes
to bring back baskets of birds.

Their whole lives chased by wind;
not a breeze, not even a gusting,
but a full-blown gale of wind
everywhere they went and each new day.

They learned to live with it,
their faces windswept
till it was woven through them.

How strange in 1930
when they were beaten in the end
and a boat brought them back to the mainland.

How strange the quiet must have seemed to them;
how it must have kept awake their nights;
how they must have had to learn to walk again
unheld by weather - to tightrope the silence,
the tree-lined boredom of our towns.

As the ghosts of white birds
still wheeled and clamoured their heads -
held in the hands of the wind.




www.kennethsteven.co.uk

Connemara

This poem, also taken from my latest collection Letting in the Light, published last month by SPCK in London, was inspired by my second visit to the Clifden Arts Festival in the west of Ireland. The poem should be dedicated to the wonderful Brendan Flynn who has been at the helm of this festival for many, many years. I wrote the piece partly in memory of Seamus Heaney (with whom I corresponded but never had the privilege of meeting). There is somehow a homage to Heaney in the final lines of the poem, for he knew well enough this sense of the wonderful melding of the marvellous and the utterly ordinary in rural Ireland. It's true here in my native Scotland too - especially in the kind of glen where my mother grew up in the Highlands. And long may it live.


CONNEMARA

From out of greyness and the months of storm -
wonderful landings of stories, shipwrecks of things,
to be handed down from mother to son,
their frayed edges mended, and sometimes new pieces
woven in from moor and mire.

All are kept safe in the drawers of everyday,
between the stone floor and the low roof,
then brought out when least expected:
lights on moorland, songs of blind harpers,
journeys to the other world, caves of gold,
stories of those with the gift of the second sight.

And then the ordinary again,
the bringing in of turf for the fire,
in among and tucked beside
the everything else that always must be done.



Kenneth Steven
www.kennethsteven.co.uk