Columba and my calling

A fierce dove, a fiercer gale, and a small epiphany on the Donegal coast.

June the ninth is Saint Columba’s day — a saint who has a particular hold on me, bound up somehow with my own slow journey toward faith.

[ A second paragraph continues the story — placeholder. It closes, as his posts do, with where the poem is collected. ]

Hear Malcolm read the poem
Columba
1:42
The sonnet — placeholder copy, not Malcolm’s poem
You called, and I came late and unaware,
half-walking and half-carried to the shore;
I did not know your name, or that the air
itself was summons, and the sea a door.
The fires were lit along the headland’s rim,
the music rose to meet the falling light,
and something in me answered, dark and dim,
a memory of morning in the night.
So let the map go; let the road be lost;
let only the long coastline lead me on,
past every harbour, whatever the cost,
until the last horizon, and the dawn.
For calling is not something we decide —
it is the tide that takes us, and the guide.
The Singing Bowl · Canterbury Press Returns each year on Columba’s day.

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