a day out of clean silk
washed like a child that’s lived for days
in fever, the light pure and perfect
and nothing troubled left in all the world
a day to love a neighbour
to see in the young field’s promise
God rippling and strong, unquestionable
four men gathered from the island
went down to the shore
ready for the vessel, eyes full and wide
and the moon rose over the rim of the earth
and fell like fish upon the sea
their moon road north
~ Kenneth Steven, excerpt from A Song Among the Stones
Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,
Tomorrow we are excited to welcome Simon de Voil and Kenneth Steven to launch A Song Among the Stones, their beautiful collaboration of music and poetry. Inspired by the journey of St. Brendan the Navigator and the papar monks, poet Kenneth Steven distilled their experience into a sequence of poems. Simon set the work to an original musical score to accompany Kenneth’s beautiful narration of this epic poem.
Kenneth offers this reflection on the genesis of the poem.
It’s hard when you get something wrong; even harder when you feel you have got everything wrong. I went to a lecture on the Hebridean island of Iona, I who had been visiting that place since early childhood; I went to that lecture believing I had little if anything to learn. Pride cometh indeed before a fall, and that was to be a hard fall all right.
To begin with, as many others, I had believed Iona to be a place of quiet and retreat from the start; where St Columba’s monks had come in the 6th Century, into the sanctuary of an edge place, to listen in quiet for the voice of God.
Stuff and nonsense! We think of everything from the perspective of the land and roads. But not them; Iona is a meeting place among the sea roads, and those Celtic Christians were fine navigators and sailors. They were fierce too; there was little gentleness about them. Well, that’s not quite true either, for they had gentle hearts but strong and defiant arms.
I had imagined Iona a quiet place in their day, where the sound of a bell and soft song carried over the moorlands; a place of meditative listening where little broke the stillness of the days and nights were beautiful under the stars.
Nothing could be further from the truth! Iona became effectively in Columba’s day a little university where the arguments went hammer and tongs over stars and science and the nature of creation. Manuscripts were being copied, new music composed and sculptors were busy carving stone.
So busy and loud was it, the lecturer told us, that some monks left. The hermit monks, the explorer monks, who found Iona so loud they needed to find real edge places in the Hebrides and beyond where they could listen better. They went north, because they were intrigued by our world and wanted to know it better. They went in the summers, in open boats, and they stayed in caves on the south coast of Iceland, Faroe and Greenland. Maybe they even reached the edge of America: would that we could know for sure.
I left that lecture chastened, as well I should have done. I left with the broken fragments of the old story of Iona in my hands, dejected. But even then something new replaced all I had grown up with and believed; the myth I had made for myself. I left with something else, the first stirrings of a poem meditation about those who had gone north, the papar monks. Their story had set me on fire and it was thudding in my heart. Over the next days and weeks the pieces of the poem poured out. It was as though they were being given from somewhere else and whenever I believed I was finished more would pour from the pen. That was how A Song Among the Stones was born.
Join us tomorrow, Monday, January 19th for a chance to listen to the finished work through a beautiful video. Simon and Kenneth will share about the inspiration they draw from their time on Iona, and the history behind the poems.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Artwork for A Song Among the Stones by Frances Law
