I HAVE always felt a close affinity with St Columba, whose day approaches as I write this. When, as a 19-year-old back in 1977, I was on a long ramble round Ireland, I happened to come into Glencolmcille when they were lighting the bonfires for St John’s Eve. Over some glasses of something strong, the folk I met there told me Columba’s story.

It all seemed strangely familiar. When someone said to me, “You have come to Colmcille because the saint is calling you: it’s all in your name,” and reminded me that Malcolm is Gaelic for “Colm’s disciple”, a memory stirred of my mother telling me how my grandmother gave me that name because she had published a poem cycle, The Legendary of St Mungo, which featured Columba meeting Mungo and had an encomium in praise of Columba, which she had chanted over me as a child.

I wrote about this experience ing a sonnet on St Columba in my 2013 collection The Singing Bowl. Now, more than a decade later, an American filmmaker, working on a short film about Columba, has asked me to narrate the film and to write some new poetry for it; so, on 9 June, Columba’s feast day, I shall be back in Donegal, in Glencolmcille, reliving those experiences, and telling part of his story, and of mine, for a new audience.

The new poetry opens with an evocation of that magical glen and the poet-saint for whom it is named:

The sun’s rays find an ancient glen
And light a hidden path
Towards the place where one was born
Who found in Christ the light of dawn
And like a holy dove has flown
To make his Lord’s forgiveness known
And lay aside all wrath.

A child of Ireland’s royal line
He served a higher King,
The last of Ireland’s ancient bards
Lover and master of true words,
Loosed from his lips like Heaven’s birds
When David, Scripture’s royal bard,
Gave him new songs to sing.

That opening prologue to the new work closes with a recollection of that first visit, nearly 50 years ago, and then opens out to the reader, and to the viewers of the film:

I came into this valley once
A young man lost and wild
And heard Columba calling me
To join him in his odyssey
And launch into the deep and see
How Heaven’s breath might carry me
To fair Iona’s Isle.

Perhaps Columba calls you too
And calls us all to sail.
To fare with him beyond the rim
And limits of our vision dim
To glimpse with him the hidden realm
That shines through this world’s veil.

It will be a joy to be in Glencolmcille again, one of the thin places of the world and to read these lines in their proper setting.