Iona
Iona
Bevil Luck
Notes
Sheiling Shepherd’s hut
Patrick St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland who was born in Roman Britain before being captured and brought to Ireland as a slave
Cambria Wales
Logres England, broadly
Currach A wickerwork and leather boat used by the Irish
Manannan Irish god of the sea, sometimes married to the sea. Pronounced here Man-ann-AN
Eriu Ireland. Pronounced here AIR-oo
Alba Scotland, broadly
Eithne St. Columba’s mother, visited in a dream by an angel carrying a shining cloth. Pronounced here AYTHE-na
IONA
ARGUMENT
The poem is set in the sixth century A.D. on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. St. Columba—the founder of the monastic community on Iona—has foreseen that a storm from Ireland would drive a crane before it, and the crane would arrive on Iona battered and weak. One of the younger monks has been tasked to find and nurse the crane, taking refuge from the oncoming storm in a sheiling—a shepherd’s hut. On the second evening the young monk receives a vision of the past and is shown the decline of Rome, the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, and St. Columba’s voyage to found the community on Iona. He watches as Columba leaves Ireland—an exile from his homeland—and travels over the sea with twelve disciples. They make land first on the Kintyre Peninsula, but Columba finds that the coast of Ireland is still in sight, so they travel further north, finally arriving on Iona. This is where the monk’s vision ends. After waking on the third morning the young monk relates his scribal duties on the island and the events that led him to find the crane. He carries the crane back to the bluff where he found her and she returns to Ireland.
For three long days, hard by a shining rock,
As light skimmed a slate sky, I slept
Against the storm, tending the injured crane.
A shieling kept me from the rain that swept
The western face; the shepherd nor the flock
In sight, just as Columba prophesied.
The roof was low and dry; beyond the door
I saw the seas gather and the wind’s flailed side
Let fall in flutes and keys the lightning shock
While the animal soul fluttered, mewled and cried,
Warm under my hand, on the shepherd’s floor.
The second morning I took my staff and went
Deep into the twisting field. A seraph’s word
Jangled in the gale. I squinted, head bent:
The light was dirty. Foam flecked the shore.
My hope was tides from deeper storms had meant
Knarls of driftwood and tangle would be interred
In dry caves, or triskeles of straw and thatch
Caught in a rock’s nook. The sea took back its lot
But a little share was left, my salt harsh catch,
Enough for sure to warm a shivering bird.
In the hut’s hearth I heaped up sticks and scratch
Then fished my pouch to find a blackened knot
Where smoulders hid, uprooted from the room
Where two days since Columba spoke my name.
I coaxed; a pulse caught in the smothered bloom—
Hushed grains of the hearth kept in a clay pot,
Fed by coal fungus which wrapped them like a womb.
The wood smoked and hissed and warmth came;
Sea dross in the oak brought scarves of green fire
With dredged light from the grain. It spat and whined
Then the ghost fell—all things that had been prior
Were returned: I saw in the riddles of flame
The alien glory of Rome, the censered Empire,
That was the porch and kith of Patrick’s mind,
Fall from Cambria and Logres, as from Gaul,
The torches put out, the spiritual form undone—
As hills at evening letting outlines fall
Till land and sky are tangled and combined—
Leaving ruins in Logres, the half-fallen wall
The fonts and altars abandoned, barely begun.
In knots of smoke I watched with altered sight
A vorant tide spill in the hollowed fosse:
Tribes with many gods, who tripped at night
Dreaming they had never known the sun.
Darkness bruised the world. Still a little light
Flared in the west: a torch and silver cross
Set up, preserved by Patrick’s canny art
With words: the second Empire, not the first.
Our saviour chose a manger set apart;
Our church shall not be of power but of loss:
The loss in the poet’s song and leper’s heart
And in the hawk’s taut stoop when stormclouds burst,
In warriors’ aching hands and weavers’ eyes
And mackerel glinting on the block at dusk.
Christ protect the shepherd from the skies,
Christ relieve the stranded sailor’s thirst,
Christ keep warm the sleeper where she lies,
Christ preserve the one who chews the rusk.
God be with us when our tale is told,
With us when they put us into graves.
When we have lain a while beneath the fold
He will raise us up, both grain and husk.
With this prayer whole generations rolled,
Founding the chapels, setting choirs and naves—
That torch had lit so many fires the straits
Glistered like blood and turned the midnight air
Like alder rubying while the axeman waits.
A shadow slipped from the shore, to cleave the waves,
The fullness of waves, with twelve subtle shipmates
Eriu’s exiles all, with twelve heads bare.
Not long for winds to harry their currach’s side
Straining the ropes, hurriedly knotted and spliced—
Under a quilt of swan-colour, Manannán’s bride
Quaked and sickened, struck green by a nightmare,
Observing in her torments in the tide
Dreams of Golgotha and the Risen Christ.
The craft was caught, half-crazed, in ocean’s curds
Sicked from the deep. They all might then have drowned
But one stood sternward, weaved a skein of words,
And suddenly the waves were paradised.
Then oars, oars, on tin seas—a knot of birds—
The air twisting, twisting—until they ground
On Alba’s almond sand and each one kissed the sand.
They lit fires, opened bread and honeycomb
But one went from them, turning from the land
To stare through sunset’s greater fire and found
On heaven’s hem old Eriu still at hand
And bitter, bitter was that scar of home.
No man should see forever what he’s lost—
At once they scuffed the coals, heart-waned, and stood
To rasp tired thumbs on sails woodish with frost
And set again to try the ruining foam.
New homes were drawing near through seaways crossed
With bosky islands, swans that roam the wood,
Where hooded sealpups vied to doss and sport
Or taunt the sailors making good the mast.
Nine years I’ve watched the harbour of my thought
To glimpse the voyage of that brotherhood
Over waves’ glen, from the glades of Connaught—
Unreal desire, to catch the hidden past,
But fire and ghost have granted unreal sight
And they had rounded Mull, the currach blown
By soft tailwinds, delicate as birdflight.
They reached the shore, made land, and at the last
Treading wet steps in seven shafts of light
Columba met Iona for his own:
His ward and portion in a severed world.
He held two precious things, each wrapped in pale
Calfskins: a book, a pot where embers curled—
Fire that has crossed the sea, to be resown.
Before the ropes were looped and sail was furled
I shouted out as one took down the sail
Columba dove Jonah dove sea-dove
Iona dove of the sea and then I woke.
The crane was restless, the rain returned above
And darkness had swallowed us like the whale.
That night was rich with crosses of Christ’s love
Like shekels stitched beneath the sleeper’s cloak—
Our saviour’s fretted emblems and his form.
The third morning we walked together back
From sleep’s familiar hills to find the storm
Off to the east and light like salt-bleached oak
Scarfing the western sea, the sheiling warm.
How many days I’ve spent, deep in the clack
Of quills, when markings on a palimpsest
Or beetle’s back are idle lenitives
For pinched eyes as I knot the peacock’s crest
Or copy chapters on the zodiac—
Columba says Iona then is blessed
In the archipelago when the oak-apple gives
An ink black-violet to the blank vellum book
And so we leave our work on nets and farms,
Put by our shining nets or shepherd’s crook,
And take the quillpen of contemplatives,
Our cloaks like woodcock on the scriptory’s hook.
We multiply till we have wincing palms
The books of Exodus and Genesis,
The Vitae Germani and Antonii,
The Chronicon, the Canon Paschalis,
And most the Gospels and the book of Psalms.
Now and then an image swings one surface
Of a swallow’s wing above reality:
A golden-curled evangelist peeps in
With law-divining eyes that never close
And I think how one summer I’ll begin
A path far north through pure theophany,
Loop on the sea’s dark hook a cloak of skin,
And tread the hidden archipelagoes
To find not storms storms but peace peace
In the radial radial world. Lie still.
My thoughts grow slippery as ambergris,
Now they flinch from God like tickled minnows
Or soar—my errant thoughts—like little geese
Miles on miles, eastwards, past a clovered hill,
To where I left my sisters one white day
Nine years ago: they’d both be women now.
I dipped my quill in this distracted way
Watching a spider climb a daffodil
When Columba called my spirit to obey—
I found him at the hearth, he told me how
A broth of air would come from Eriu’s door
Casting a guest ahead with tattered wings,
Then from the hearth he took a spark to store
In a clay pot. He told me to allow
Three days to tend the visitor, ensure
All anguish left the bone—that a shieling’s
Roof would shelter us through the weather’s rout
And fire would bring the ghost. He said be strong
And arm your thoughts, be watchful and devout
For air is flooded with the fallen things,
A monster hangs in it. Wind stirs without.
The sea is sharper. Time you went along.
I found her fallen in a clot of thorns
Beyond a shining rock. Now I return
Holding her in my arms. She rustles, yawns
—The distant matins of Columba’s song
Resounds as near and loud as Pictish horns—
She steps into the air. I can discern
Her only as a speck above the scarp,
And she will go to Eriu with the seals
Until we set that music up with harp
And pedalharp, and one last song to learn.
The light clings to Iona, cut glass sharp—
I see the world, and all the light reveals:
Grain and fire, silver, ink and sand, and none’s
Whole without Him, till each in Him combine:
Memory’s hoop may keep a thousand suns,
Great circles circles in great wheels wheels,
But all will be changed, each golden wheel that runs
Be changed, each sun eternally align,
The hinge of heaven be opened in a night
And godhead break across the blazing grain.
For now we work and travel, pray and write
To hasten His approach with every sign—
The cloth the seraph left to Eithne of light
We’ll spread abroad each day, to quilt again
These shrine-tipped seas a thousand prayers have kept.
Bevil Luck
Poet & Researcher
Bevil is from the valley of the River Fowey in Cornwall. He read English at Merton College, Oxford before completing his doctorate on the poetry of F.T. Prince in 2019 at the University of Southampton. He now lives and works in Oxford. His verse-translation of the 12th-century song “Leu chansonet’ e vil” by Giraut de Bornelh was published in Delos in autumn 2018. New poems are also now appearing in The Brazen Head.
Photography by Nils Leonhardt