Evensong

Kenneth Steven

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780281064809
• eBook ISBN: 9780281066537
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Kenneth Steven's poems are inspired first and foremost by wildscape, by the places and people of Highland Perthshire and of the Celtic west - Iona and the Hebrides. But they are inspired by faith too, by the struggle to see God in the complexities of this world's turmoil and find light in the darkness.

THREE DAYS

I

All day under the circling

The golden hugeness of the sun

Beat by beat the maddening, terrible day

The terrible madness until, suddenly, at last

The sky went ugly with bruises, a thunder stuttered

In the red hills and the rain came hard as grapes

heavy, hissing, huge, and lightning gouged the dust.

His face, she saw his face, her son

The son she’d brought into a stable

Shining with bright rain and blood in rivers

And how his head slipped forwards, finished

His shoulders torn like wings, like angel wings

Broken now for ever by the weight

Of this last loss of God.

But even then they waited, the soldiers and the priests

Watching him with gaping mouths as if they still expected

He might speak or heal or teach.

They watched the rain shine his shoulders and his broken head

Hour after hour after hour

As if they feared him still.

II

Nothing. All through the night

Listening and locking doors, whispering

Just in case. Shadows

Ghosting the streets, the gnaw

Of hunger. The going over and over

The ashes of the days, searching

For something that might make sense.

No star in the sky, no light –

Just the wound of morning in the end,

Before remembering, before trying to pray

In the empty silence of the walls

And feeling all the words like dust

Scattered and blown away.

The slow beat of time, hour by hour

Like drops of blood, like drops of grief

Till night and sleepless dark.

III

It was over. They left Jerusalem in the dead of night;

No light alive, the grey rocks of the last days

Raw and jagged in their throats.

They were fishermen, went back, broken

To the only thing they knew, to Galilee.

And all night nothing;

The skies aubergine, a piling of bruised clouds,

The lake eerie and moonless, creeping with shadows,

The cold leaking into feet and hands like leprosy.

Dawn was a wound in the east, a gash,

The twist of a rusted knife.

And there a figure on the shore beside a fire,

Someone who seemed to wait for them.

They drudged up the boats, deep into dry sand.

He spoke to them with his eyes,

Gave them pieces of smoky fish.

The...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Basket of Water
• The Linn
• Easter
• Once Upon a Time
• Morning
• All I Know
• Make-Believe
• November
• Solace
• Swallows
• Gliese 581
• Daffodil
• Sam
• Believing
• Curlews
• The Summer House
• The Disappeared
• Thaw
• October
• One Winter
• Harvest
• Signing
• Doves
• Wild Irises
• Behind the White
• Fog
• For John Clare
• The Carpenter
• A Poem
• Lenin
• Shallowater
• Romjula
• The Fishing
• Transcendence
• The Quinces
• Afterwards
• Sanctuary
• Three Days
• Lullaby for the Days that Lie Ahead
• Clearing the Snow
• Endpiece
• Argyll, October
• Evensong, Ampleforth