Skellig Michael

Skellig Michael

Kenneth Steven

586 AD

Remember when they brought you here
in a bob of boat that lurched and swung
beneath this barren whaleback in the sea.
Then you started climbing rock by rock;
tugged and tousled by the wind each step
until at last you stood on top,
held in the breathlessness of blown blue sky –
the whole gusting wildness of this world
out in the pounding of the seas.

Then the building began;
the heaving up of boulder after boulder,
balancing them together till you’d made
a beehive you could creep inside.
Dry, dark and deep: a cave of peace,
a cocoon where three of you could sleep
after the long prayers of the place
they called the sanctuary.

Just sometimes you came out bleary-eyed
to stand at midnight in the silence
of a night left silver, stars
like mist across the skies, that stillness
reaching to the edges of the sea.
You knew for sure that something greater than all this
had made it beautiful, had breathed it into being.

---

Kenneth Steven
Poet & Painter

Kenneth is a Scottish poet, writer and painter who, with his wife, leads retreats on Celtic Christianity on the Island of Iona. A recent collection is, Iona: New and Selected Poems.

Photography by Roman Roy