Willow

Tomorrow I will set off for Stuttgart in the south-west of Germany. It's there that my four and a half year old daughter Willow lives with her mother. The pain of the last three years - separation and all the bitterness of divorce - has been worse than anything I could have imagined. It is made much worse by the hundreds of miles that separate us. I was told at the very beginning of all this nightmarish process that I had rights as a father: of course I had rights. What no-one told me was that rights are meaningless unless you establish them in a court of law: until that is done you have nothing. And the establishing of them costs all that lawyers are able to drag from you: not only money, but dignity also. It has been a humiliating and exhausting process. Over those three years I have scribbled words on backs of envelopes; I have written fragments I was barely conscious of writing at all. Poetry was hardly in my head: I lived in four different houses, out of a stack of boxes and bags. How could poetry be in my head? And yet poems have crept in through the cracks of the darkness all the same, and after a long time I gathered them up and read them and put them together. SPCK in London have just accepted this new collection for publication in 2016: I think it is appropriate that it should be entitled Letting in the Light. And this is the last poem from the book, remembering the day my beloved Willow was christened.


We drove through grey silence;
the skies drifting with snow
in a winter that would not end.

At the church I made promises
in a language I did not know -
and a German bell rang out,
strange in the muffled day.

And then you ran to me, Willow,
and you carried the sun in your running;
you poured into laughter and ran
as though all the war was over.

And inside a shell broke
that Easter Sunday morning;
a shell like a bird's egg
flooded over with warm light.

The long folly of words,
the gunneries of rage,
the anger of small conflicts -
useless, forgotten, gone.

The land left open
for the love of sunlight -
the beginning of another spring.

Rain

There is a title I have never yet used that remains nonetheless in my head: It rained when it should have snowed. There is rain all round my house here in Highland Scotland tonight: there has been not a sign of frost yet. I find it strange how people react to what is an undoubted change: they're grateful for mild days. So are the tabloid newspapers, rejoicing over the hottest July day and exulting the fact that the temperature in London has broken all records. It rained when it should have snowed. Yes, in my childhood there would have been snow in the hills by now; our nights would have been frosty. Most years the snow lay for at least two weeks: I built a slide in my garden and, like every other boy since time began, I bewailed the final melting of the ice. Now we are shocked when the ice is there for more than a few days: it is almost as though something has gone wrong. No, it is the mildness that is wrong. A few years ago I spoke with a man on the west coast of Greenland who showed me the bit of coast beyond his window where he had grown up. Once upon a time there was thick ice in winter, he told me: we used to drive over the ice to visit friends, he said. Now there is no more ice: it retreats ten miles further north each year. It rained when it should have snowed. And will anything be done about the melting at the Paris summit? I fear we'll make promises that we'll change our ways by 2020 or 2045: the deadline will be pushed on a little further yet again. As it rains when it should snow.


AFTER THE STORM

The valley lay in the window
Dazed and damaged.

The river horsed under bridges
Swirling with earth and rain.

The fields were filled with mirrors, glass stretches
Reflecting a breaking sky.

The house was silent, left unhumming -
We were powerless, there was nothing we could do.


(From Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London).

The Road

There is one book that has had a huge impact on my psyche over the last few years. It's a thin novel that was sent to me by a friend from Edinburgh: she had put between its pages a short letter and sent it on its way, telling me how much it had meant to her. I am not the reader I once was. That book, together with its letter, lay forgotten in one of the many piles about the house until I came to move it once too often. Now it demanded my attention and that night I opened the book. To say that I was haunted by it is too feeble a description by far. I am not sure that any book has occupied my thinking in the way that this one has done: 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. On the surface it is the simplest of stories: a man and his young boy are walking a destroyed landscape in search of something. We learn piece by piece what it is they have left behind and what they are moving towards, or may be seeking. And yet we don't ever know the full truth. This landscape, a ravaged America, has witnessed some terrible disaster. The trees, the rivers and the sea are all dead. The land is occupied by a few bands of merciless marauders, and all of them use the artery of the road. But what endures in one's reading of this book is a sheer pervading sense of the love possible between a father and his child. One scene stands out for me above all the rest. At one point the two break into a petrol station and find a dispenser which has long since been toppled over and raided. Just one can of cola remains. The father opens it and gives it to the boy to drink. He simply sits and watches his son drinking, happy to witness his brief happiness at a few fresh mouthfuls of dark bubbles.
I think it was most likely 'The Road' that set me thinking about the fragility of our world and the savage stupidity of the way we abuse and consume it. However long ago I found myself writing a poem which gained the title 'The Ghost Orchid', named after yet another species we have destroyed. The poem is published in my last collection 'Coracle' from SPCK in London.


One day, when the air is sore to breathe
And the seas are dead and heavy, thudding
Over empty shores, and only a dwindling of us

Remain - strange, in hiding,
From yellow and red skies,
From scabbed earth -

We will draw in caves
The eerie shapes
Of everything we remember;

We will weave out of firelight
What fields meant, what horses were,
The story of flowing water, of birds bringing morning into song.

And for a while
Before we have grown old
Like moss on rocks, furred and searching with age,

Our children will believe
It was that beautiful,
That good.

Scotland

I've grown up in the Highlands of Scotland. My mother's people came from Wester Ross, one of the wildest parts of the country, with more deer and sheep by far than humans. During the 19th Century many thousands were evicted from their crofts by the landlords, the lairds, and sent to the growing cities or to America or Australia. Most of them never returned. It's often a landscape that foreigners fall in love with: these rugged miles of heather-covered, treeless hills. Yet it's actually a ravaged landscape; it has been transformed by man, and by centuries of bad management. But even to this day you can find the remains of those ruined crofts; the scars and the sadness of the clearances are still all too evident. At the moment, Scotland is in the process of working out what it wants to be; whether it will remain part of the United Kingdom or find the courage to become independent once more. This poem, now part of my volume of selected poems Island, reflects on all the questions we're asking.


The State of Scotland

See this land through a broken window,
all huddled in mist, rocked by storm,
the whole long drudge of winter.

Half its people want to leave;
the other half who want to stay
don't choose, they have no choice.

Our history is written in the hills. We are filled
with pride for what we think we did
and guilt for what we didn't do.

We drift into cities since we cannot stand
the sound of our own thoughts. We spend our lives
being loud, and trying to forget.

Do we want freedom or just the chance
to mourn not having it? We are willing to fight
for all that we don't want.

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.