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
Tuesday, 11 October 2016
Friday, 7 October 2016
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
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
Tuesday, 4 October 2016
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
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
Monday, 26 September 2016
Listening
Listening
A sky from which all but the last blue has been lost
So the mountain against it stands like a great smoothed tusk
Wintered alone.
There is no wind, and yet
Sometimes the uppermost spindles of the birch trees dance
Criss-crossing the sky.
All of it about coming to a cabin to ask for quiet
Waiting for blue lightning to flash the ground
Just once, and leave words burned in frozen snow.
From Kenneth Steven's newest volume of poems - Letting in the Light - published by SPCK in London in September 2016, and available also as an e-book.
A sky from which all but the last blue has been lost
So the mountain against it stands like a great smoothed tusk
Wintered alone.
There is no wind, and yet
Sometimes the uppermost spindles of the birch trees dance
Criss-crossing the sky.
All of it about coming to a cabin to ask for quiet
Waiting for blue lightning to flash the ground
Just once, and leave words burned in frozen snow.
From Kenneth Steven's newest volume of poems - Letting in the Light - published by SPCK in London in September 2016, and available also as an e-book.
Monday, 29 August 2016
Greenland
A few days ago I saw an image on the internet that imprinted itself on my subconscious. It was all the more shocking because I was exploring something entirely different, and as a result I was quite unprepared for what I saw. It was a small picture at the bottom of my screen of a starving polar bear attempting to climb onto a thin fragment of ice. The bear looked to be a quarter or even less of its normal weight: there was little left of the creature. It was the remains of a polar bear.
A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting Greenland. It is a wondrous country: the biggest island in the world with just fifty thousand of a population. There are no roads in Greenland: the tiny communities that hug the coast are linked by sea. I have thought of it since as a child's fantasy kingdom: when you look up at the mountains you can hardly believe the height of them, or the sharpness of the peaks. It is the most hauntingly beautiful place I have ever seen.
I spoke to a man from one of the villages who remembered his childhood. He said that when he was a boy they drove round to visit friends in winter. Not by road - there were no roads then any more than there are none now - but by sea. They got into their cars and they crossed the sea ice to visit friends. Now, he told us, there is no sea ice. Not that it is too thin for such driving: there is no ice at all. He told us the ice is retreating a full ten miles each year.
Before I left Greenland I bought one souvenir - a tiny carved polar bear. A long time later I wrote this poem, remembering the precious days of our stay and thinking of the future. I thought of it the other day, when I saw the image of the starving polar bear and all day could not put it from my mind.
Last year in Greenland I bought it
Under great whales of mountains by a sea of ice,
From a table of things all carved from shining:
Little men threading water, their softstone canoes,
Walrus rearing at harpoons in mid-roar.
Now, all this time later, that place
Remains like some story from a book.
I turn it in the light, my polar bear on a pad of ice,
And think of the world wilting in the sun's wrath,
And nowhere left for the polar bear to go.
Kenneth Steven www.kennethsteven.co.uk
From Salt and Light, published in 2011 by Saint Andrew Press
A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting Greenland. It is a wondrous country: the biggest island in the world with just fifty thousand of a population. There are no roads in Greenland: the tiny communities that hug the coast are linked by sea. I have thought of it since as a child's fantasy kingdom: when you look up at the mountains you can hardly believe the height of them, or the sharpness of the peaks. It is the most hauntingly beautiful place I have ever seen.
I spoke to a man from one of the villages who remembered his childhood. He said that when he was a boy they drove round to visit friends in winter. Not by road - there were no roads then any more than there are none now - but by sea. They got into their cars and they crossed the sea ice to visit friends. Now, he told us, there is no sea ice. Not that it is too thin for such driving: there is no ice at all. He told us the ice is retreating a full ten miles each year.
Before I left Greenland I bought one souvenir - a tiny carved polar bear. A long time later I wrote this poem, remembering the precious days of our stay and thinking of the future. I thought of it the other day, when I saw the image of the starving polar bear and all day could not put it from my mind.
Last year in Greenland I bought it
Under great whales of mountains by a sea of ice,
From a table of things all carved from shining:
Little men threading water, their softstone canoes,
Walrus rearing at harpoons in mid-roar.
Now, all this time later, that place
Remains like some story from a book.
I turn it in the light, my polar bear on a pad of ice,
And think of the world wilting in the sun's wrath,
And nowhere left for the polar bear to go.
Kenneth Steven www.kennethsteven.co.uk
From Salt and Light, published in 2011 by Saint Andrew Press
Friday, 19 August 2016
Games
I find that I have to write this before the end of the Olympic days in Brazil. The news bulletins here in Britain have spoken of little else for weeks: the gold medal by one or other British athlete is the first headline each morning.
And hidden somewhere in among the end-pieces of the news, there are sometimes stories from Syria. Almost like tiny fragments of debris: things found among the ruins. I keep wondering - as I have done almost since the beginning of this war - just how huge the aftermath of it will be. The longer it continues the greater the shadow somehow, and the more terrible the stories that emerge.
But we do not really care. I continue to have this awful sense of the way in which we rank human beings: somehow there is an order of importance. We know that white Europeans essentially come top, and news from other places has to be pretty desperate before we take much notice. Even with all the horror that emerges concerning Syria in the end, I do not believe for one moment that we will be changed by it. We may think we learn for a time; the truth is that we will forget once more.
So what is the point of writing at all? I sit beside my computer screen in the tranquillity and late summer beauty of Highland Perthshire in the north of Scotland. I have the freedom to write what I want; as is evidenced by what I put onto the screen. It is a kind of prayer for the forgotten people of Syria; a cry into the darkness that we might look and listen and remember.
Somehow the suffering I see on my screen and at the news stands puts all my petty concern into perspective. I think of my beloved five year old child - for whom I would do anything, were it necessary - and I think of the fathers of Syria who can do nothing for the pain and cruelty and hunger that their equally beloved little ones are suffering.
Here in Dunkeld, in this most beautiful corner of Scotland, we are known for our music. I had the idea of gathering together some of the better known musicians to give a concert in our Cathedral, on behalf of the Syrian cause. We found a charity called Edinburgh Direct Aid and we asked them to come to speak to us about the work they were doing to alleviate the suffering in Syria. We hoped that a few would join us from the local community: this is only a small rural village.
The cathedral was so full that we had to find extra seats for people. There were over 500 present. That day, after a magnificent concert, we raised £5 000. We were pleased: it had been worthwhile. Then came the amazing news: someone present had been so moved by the event and what had been created that they were donating £20 000 to Edinburgh Direct Aid. Mighty oaks and little acorns.
And hidden somewhere in among the end-pieces of the news, there are sometimes stories from Syria. Almost like tiny fragments of debris: things found among the ruins. I keep wondering - as I have done almost since the beginning of this war - just how huge the aftermath of it will be. The longer it continues the greater the shadow somehow, and the more terrible the stories that emerge.
But we do not really care. I continue to have this awful sense of the way in which we rank human beings: somehow there is an order of importance. We know that white Europeans essentially come top, and news from other places has to be pretty desperate before we take much notice. Even with all the horror that emerges concerning Syria in the end, I do not believe for one moment that we will be changed by it. We may think we learn for a time; the truth is that we will forget once more.
So what is the point of writing at all? I sit beside my computer screen in the tranquillity and late summer beauty of Highland Perthshire in the north of Scotland. I have the freedom to write what I want; as is evidenced by what I put onto the screen. It is a kind of prayer for the forgotten people of Syria; a cry into the darkness that we might look and listen and remember.
Somehow the suffering I see on my screen and at the news stands puts all my petty concern into perspective. I think of my beloved five year old child - for whom I would do anything, were it necessary - and I think of the fathers of Syria who can do nothing for the pain and cruelty and hunger that their equally beloved little ones are suffering.
Here in Dunkeld, in this most beautiful corner of Scotland, we are known for our music. I had the idea of gathering together some of the better known musicians to give a concert in our Cathedral, on behalf of the Syrian cause. We found a charity called Edinburgh Direct Aid and we asked them to come to speak to us about the work they were doing to alleviate the suffering in Syria. We hoped that a few would join us from the local community: this is only a small rural village.
The cathedral was so full that we had to find extra seats for people. There were over 500 present. That day, after a magnificent concert, we raised £5 000. We were pleased: it had been worthwhile. Then came the amazing news: someone present had been so moved by the event and what had been created that they were donating £20 000 to Edinburgh Direct Aid. Mighty oaks and little acorns.
Thursday, 11 August 2016
Living Room
Living Room
Now the storm of last night's passed;
everything lies torn in early morning
like a ship left tattered on the sea,
her rigging all in shreds, decks strewn with debris -
yet the storm itself forgotten, meaningless
beneath the glass-clear sky of morning.
You lie asleep, your hand curled white,
your breathing barely there at all;
and I come close on soundless feet and see
the shouting strewn about the floor,
the twisted arguments, the accusations -
I hear the echo of the long, slow crying
before the silence fell and we both crept away
to the corners of the dark, to gnaw the silence
and hear our hearts until we slept at last.
Now we have awakened into this strange day
and will not know what we should say or think
but look away, pretend, do everything
as if in some unwritten play, and acting badly -
wondering what happens next, how everything will end.
From Kenneth Steven's newest collection of poems, Letting in the Light, just published by SPCK in London; a volume about the pain of marital breakdown and the parting from a beloved child.
ISBN 978-0-281-07670-3
Now the storm of last night's passed;
everything lies torn in early morning
like a ship left tattered on the sea,
her rigging all in shreds, decks strewn with debris -
yet the storm itself forgotten, meaningless
beneath the glass-clear sky of morning.
You lie asleep, your hand curled white,
your breathing barely there at all;
and I come close on soundless feet and see
the shouting strewn about the floor,
the twisted arguments, the accusations -
I hear the echo of the long, slow crying
before the silence fell and we both crept away
to the corners of the dark, to gnaw the silence
and hear our hearts until we slept at last.
Now we have awakened into this strange day
and will not know what we should say or think
but look away, pretend, do everything
as if in some unwritten play, and acting badly -
wondering what happens next, how everything will end.
From Kenneth Steven's newest collection of poems, Letting in the Light, just published by SPCK in London; a volume about the pain of marital breakdown and the parting from a beloved child.
ISBN 978-0-281-07670-3
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