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)
Sunday, 22 May 2016
Sunday, 1 May 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
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
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Helen
I've not written for a few days now, mainly because I haven't had the heart. I lost my dear sister to cancer and despite having stood at her graveside in Sutherland, in the top left hand corner of Scotland, I can't believe she's gone. I won't truly believe that, I think, until I've landed on the Isle of Iona and know that she won't be there to greet me, to tell me of some new adventure she's planning, or to take me on a walk to somewhere I've not known before. I keep saying that she was the youngest person I've ever known. That's why my family's still struggling to believe it's possible she's gone: she had such extraordinary vitality, such a huge sense of fun and laughter, that no-one can understand how it could be taken away. Somehow I think of her as the human embodiment of an otter: they are always on the move - for all the hours of the day they are frisking and searching and diving and sliding. They are water come alive; flowing in every direction. Somehow that sums up Helen. For all the last days I have felt numb and have written not a word. Then at five thirty this morning phrases began tugging me, and after three hours of scribbling I felt the poem had found its way onto the page.
My Sister Helen
She was Scotland to me:
bedtime stories that woke me
to the history of Wallace and Bruce,
would have had me up in a saddle,
galloping back in time
for the bits of the border we'd lost.
She lived down endless long windings of bumps,
in cottages with attics and owls -
the hope of conkers in the morning.
She drove me one August night
when the skies were orange and bruised,
till the storm was flickering booms
and we came back in the silvering rain.
She was drives at high speed
down roads that should have closed long ago,
in cars that were held together
by the hope of a better tomorrow.
She would coax a whole ceilidh
out of a candle and an old bothy;
she was songs and tin whistles
in the middle of the worst of blizzards.
She was a beach where you could always swim,
and a place you'd not known before;
she was a fire that would set you alight,
an adventure that was yet to be planned.
Kenneth Steven 2016
www.kennethsteven.co.uk
My Sister Helen
She was Scotland to me:
bedtime stories that woke me
to the history of Wallace and Bruce,
would have had me up in a saddle,
galloping back in time
for the bits of the border we'd lost.
She lived down endless long windings of bumps,
in cottages with attics and owls -
the hope of conkers in the morning.
She drove me one August night
when the skies were orange and bruised,
till the storm was flickering booms
and we came back in the silvering rain.
She was drives at high speed
down roads that should have closed long ago,
in cars that were held together
by the hope of a better tomorrow.
She would coax a whole ceilidh
out of a candle and an old bothy;
she was songs and tin whistles
in the middle of the worst of blizzards.
She was a beach where you could always swim,
and a place you'd not known before;
she was a fire that would set you alight,
an adventure that was yet to be planned.
Kenneth Steven 2016
www.kennethsteven.co.uk
Sunday, 10 April 2016
Gaelic
Although I write in English, and English is the language I grew up with, I sometimes remember that I should have grown up with the Gaelic language too. My mother's family were all from the West Highlands of Scotland: they were crofting people - sheep, hens, a little arable land. It was a struggle against a constant fear of poverty, and that was the way it had been for hundreds of years. Although my mother was brought up in a household where English was the first language, both her parents - my grandparents - had plenty of the Gaelic language in their blood. But by the first decades of last century, it was a language that had been actively persecuted for a hundred and fifty years.
The Battle of Culloden, the final half hour of slaughter at the end of the second Jacobite Rising, fought in 1746, sealed the fate of the northern half of Scotland for ever. It led to the Clearances, where hundreds of thousands of Highland Scots left the country for America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The whole Jacobite story is a mighty complex business, not something that can be neatly described in a few paragraphs. But it's a story worth exploring nonetheless. Many modern day Scots have a dangerously oversimplified view of this story as having been a fight between England and Scotland. That view is not helped by the Hollywoodisation of history through films like Braveheart. The simple truth is that it was most complicated.
What is much clearer is the aftermath. The Hanoverian forces, fresh from their victory at Culloden, set about bringing the Highlands into line. Villages were burned and innocent people, whose only crime was to speak the Gaelic language, were hanged. Some of the Highland survivors of the battle were taken down to England and hung, drawn and quartered. The message was clear: never was this kind of rebellion to happen again.
In the years that followed, two very clever strategies were employed to enforce that message. The first was the building of military roads into the wildest parts of the Highlands to ensure that soldiers could reach every corner as quickly as possible. The second was the establishment of tiny schools in every glen for one purpose above all others - the teaching of the English language and the suppression of the Gaelic tongue. Gaelic was the language of the rebellious Highlanders, so Gaelic had to be brought under control.
It was a strategy employed elsewhere in the Celtic countries, and it was most successful. I sometimes think it's amazing any Gaelic at all remains in the Scottish Highlands, so efficiently was the programme carried out after 1746. What happened in the end was that many Highlanders came to hate their own language: they refused to pass it on to their children, seeing it as a handicap compared with 'useful' languages like French and German. By the time my mother went to school half an hour from Inverness, her headmaster - a fine speaker of Gaelic himself - believed that any child speaking his tongue should have the living daylights beaten out of him. And that kind of thinking was seen as joined-up.
There's something of a revival in Gaelic in today's Scotland, but it's by no means an easy story of success. There are pockets of progress: that's all one can say. But there's a long way to go.
AFTER CULLODEN
The wounded wandered home in Gaelic
by rivers and back roads;
all they had fought for
unsure and broken.
Hoe long before they saw
their language and their land
like a limb that's tied too tight,
still there but dying all the time.
Or like a wildcat caught at last
not killed, but tamed;
de-clawed, castrated -
then stroked and told to purr.
Kenneth Steven 2016
The Battle of Culloden, the final half hour of slaughter at the end of the second Jacobite Rising, fought in 1746, sealed the fate of the northern half of Scotland for ever. It led to the Clearances, where hundreds of thousands of Highland Scots left the country for America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The whole Jacobite story is a mighty complex business, not something that can be neatly described in a few paragraphs. But it's a story worth exploring nonetheless. Many modern day Scots have a dangerously oversimplified view of this story as having been a fight between England and Scotland. That view is not helped by the Hollywoodisation of history through films like Braveheart. The simple truth is that it was most complicated.
What is much clearer is the aftermath. The Hanoverian forces, fresh from their victory at Culloden, set about bringing the Highlands into line. Villages were burned and innocent people, whose only crime was to speak the Gaelic language, were hanged. Some of the Highland survivors of the battle were taken down to England and hung, drawn and quartered. The message was clear: never was this kind of rebellion to happen again.
In the years that followed, two very clever strategies were employed to enforce that message. The first was the building of military roads into the wildest parts of the Highlands to ensure that soldiers could reach every corner as quickly as possible. The second was the establishment of tiny schools in every glen for one purpose above all others - the teaching of the English language and the suppression of the Gaelic tongue. Gaelic was the language of the rebellious Highlanders, so Gaelic had to be brought under control.
It was a strategy employed elsewhere in the Celtic countries, and it was most successful. I sometimes think it's amazing any Gaelic at all remains in the Scottish Highlands, so efficiently was the programme carried out after 1746. What happened in the end was that many Highlanders came to hate their own language: they refused to pass it on to their children, seeing it as a handicap compared with 'useful' languages like French and German. By the time my mother went to school half an hour from Inverness, her headmaster - a fine speaker of Gaelic himself - believed that any child speaking his tongue should have the living daylights beaten out of him. And that kind of thinking was seen as joined-up.
There's something of a revival in Gaelic in today's Scotland, but it's by no means an easy story of success. There are pockets of progress: that's all one can say. But there's a long way to go.
AFTER CULLODEN
The wounded wandered home in Gaelic
by rivers and back roads;
all they had fought for
unsure and broken.
Hoe long before they saw
their language and their land
like a limb that's tied too tight,
still there but dying all the time.
Or like a wildcat caught at last
not killed, but tamed;
de-clawed, castrated -
then stroked and told to purr.
Kenneth Steven 2016
Friday, 25 March 2016
The Horses
Edwin Muir was born at the end of the 19th Century on the tiny island of Wyre in the Orkneys. Mechanisation had not come to the island: he grew up in a little world that had not changed for hundreds of years. It was a magical childhood: no doors were locked and there was a kindness and trust between people the like of which he never experienced again.
But the family fell on hard times and had to move to mainland Orkney first of all, and was then plunged into the horrors of industrial Glasgow. One after another, the closest members of his family died until he alone was left. The trauma of what he experienced in those first years never left him, nor did his yearning for the Eden of that island home. Essentially through all the rest of his life as a poet he was searching and searching for Wyre, and for all that he had lost.
In the last years of his life he wrote a deeply haunting poem entitled 'The Horses'. It's a poem of the new nuclear age: a devastating war has destroyed the nations, and a little huddle of people are left on what might be an island. Their tractors lie useless in the fields: their radios are dumb. They wait in the silence, wondering what will happen next.
And what happens is that a great wave of horses flows into their midst. They have come unbidden, horses having been sold for tractors long years before. But the horses come of their own volition, as though in answer to some unheard call. They come willing to pull their ploughs and bear their loads.
I believe that through this poem Muir finds his way back to the island of his childhood. The paradox is that he finds it through the imagining of nuclear winter and a post apocalyptic state. For that is the only way the detritus of our modern clutter can be cleared away and there can be a beginning again. This is what is necessary for a healing to happen, for the noise to be stilled and for listening to begin.
Find the poem and read it as an Easter meditation. And my programme on the whole story of Muir's life, and on the poem, will be broadcast this Easter Sunday at 4.30pm on BBC Radio 4. If you miss it, the programme will be available for a number of days via Listen Again.
www.kennethsteven.co.uk
But the family fell on hard times and had to move to mainland Orkney first of all, and was then plunged into the horrors of industrial Glasgow. One after another, the closest members of his family died until he alone was left. The trauma of what he experienced in those first years never left him, nor did his yearning for the Eden of that island home. Essentially through all the rest of his life as a poet he was searching and searching for Wyre, and for all that he had lost.
In the last years of his life he wrote a deeply haunting poem entitled 'The Horses'. It's a poem of the new nuclear age: a devastating war has destroyed the nations, and a little huddle of people are left on what might be an island. Their tractors lie useless in the fields: their radios are dumb. They wait in the silence, wondering what will happen next.
And what happens is that a great wave of horses flows into their midst. They have come unbidden, horses having been sold for tractors long years before. But the horses come of their own volition, as though in answer to some unheard call. They come willing to pull their ploughs and bear their loads.
I believe that through this poem Muir finds his way back to the island of his childhood. The paradox is that he finds it through the imagining of nuclear winter and a post apocalyptic state. For that is the only way the detritus of our modern clutter can be cleared away and there can be a beginning again. This is what is necessary for a healing to happen, for the noise to be stilled and for listening to begin.
Find the poem and read it as an Easter meditation. And my programme on the whole story of Muir's life, and on the poem, will be broadcast this Easter Sunday at 4.30pm on BBC Radio 4. If you miss it, the programme will be available for a number of days via Listen Again.
www.kennethsteven.co.uk
Sunday, 20 March 2016
Vanguard
Almost every week I travel to the west coast of Scotland by one of the finest railway lines I've ever experienced - that linking Glasgow and Oban. It passes through some of the most beautiful landscape Scotland possesses, until it arrives at the western edge, where an island-studded coastline begins.
It's because of that journey it's all the more poignant and painful to travel right past the Faslane nuclear base where the Trident submarine fleet is deployed. Were it to be unleashed, it would result in the equivalent of two thousand Hiroshimas. I find the obscenity of that horror, set against the purity and the fragility of the landscape which surrounds it, almost too much to bear.
It's one of the main reasons I am passionately committed to Scottish independence, because Scotland never voted for the deployment of the Trident fleet, nor did Scotland have any say in that deployment. It was decided in London. The nuclear base is sited just half an hour from Glasgow, the second largest conurbation in the British Isles. The people of Scotland would not have voted for Trident had they been given the choice: it's as simple as that.
In a post 9/11 world, the nuclear base at Faslane becomes the biggest imaginable target for a suicide bomber. This submarine fleet might have been appropriate (just and no more) in the bad old days of the Cold War, but in a new age of rogue states and rogue militants, it's nothing more than a target waiting for a dart.
I believe nuclear weapons, and the industry that gave them birth, to be nothing less than an obscenity. I cannot reconcile a nuclear armed world with a God who stands behind the creation of this priceless planet. To think that we would contemplate its destruction with the depression of a single button (for that is what we do when we deploy such weapons' systems) is beyond all belief.
If a man should come now to your door
selling motorways, a rustle of money in his eyes;
do not buy his road, for it leads
to all our lost riches, our need of God.
(From A Poem for Ivars, published in Island, the selected poems of Kenneth Steven, Saint Andrew Press)
It's because of that journey it's all the more poignant and painful to travel right past the Faslane nuclear base where the Trident submarine fleet is deployed. Were it to be unleashed, it would result in the equivalent of two thousand Hiroshimas. I find the obscenity of that horror, set against the purity and the fragility of the landscape which surrounds it, almost too much to bear.
It's one of the main reasons I am passionately committed to Scottish independence, because Scotland never voted for the deployment of the Trident fleet, nor did Scotland have any say in that deployment. It was decided in London. The nuclear base is sited just half an hour from Glasgow, the second largest conurbation in the British Isles. The people of Scotland would not have voted for Trident had they been given the choice: it's as simple as that.
In a post 9/11 world, the nuclear base at Faslane becomes the biggest imaginable target for a suicide bomber. This submarine fleet might have been appropriate (just and no more) in the bad old days of the Cold War, but in a new age of rogue states and rogue militants, it's nothing more than a target waiting for a dart.
I believe nuclear weapons, and the industry that gave them birth, to be nothing less than an obscenity. I cannot reconcile a nuclear armed world with a God who stands behind the creation of this priceless planet. To think that we would contemplate its destruction with the depression of a single button (for that is what we do when we deploy such weapons' systems) is beyond all belief.
If a man should come now to your door
selling motorways, a rustle of money in his eyes;
do not buy his road, for it leads
to all our lost riches, our need of God.
(From A Poem for Ivars, published in Island, the selected poems of Kenneth Steven, Saint Andrew Press)
Monday, 14 March 2016
Easter Lilies
Easter Lilies
We forget all about them
in the year's darkness, in the long winter.
Without a sound they are there one morning;
a kind of sunlight grown from the ground -
as if some call had woken them
from the underworld of their sleep,
out into the middle of March
to Easter the earth with their heads.
Flapped and flayed by the wind,
broken yolks splashing the air;
all that we had hoped for -
an answer to prayer.
From Kenneth Steven's 2014 collection from SPCK in London, Coracle
We forget all about them
in the year's darkness, in the long winter.
Without a sound they are there one morning;
a kind of sunlight grown from the ground -
as if some call had woken them
from the underworld of their sleep,
out into the middle of March
to Easter the earth with their heads.
Flapped and flayed by the wind,
broken yolks splashing the air;
all that we had hoped for -
an answer to prayer.
From Kenneth Steven's 2014 collection from SPCK in London, Coracle
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