One Star in the West

To have got so far, alone
Almost to the seventieth stone
Is a wonder.
There was thunder

A few miles back, a storm-shaken
Hill and sea, the bridge broken
[The bright fluent burn
A bruised torrent]

But all cleared
Larks were singing
Again, the April rain ringing
Across the sewn hills,
Among the daffodils


The road winds uphill, but
A wonder will be to sit
On the stone at last -
One star in the west.

George Mackay Brown (1921 - 1996)

The Brocken Spectre 2, or A Poem for Billo, who is still away

Against Biography

by William Bronk

We came to where the trees, if there were trees,

say, a little group of them, or a house
maybe, something there, whatever it was,

a man standing, someone, it would be clear

enough, sharp at the edges but everything else

was blurred, all running together or else

moving - sideways, back and forth- or the scale

was wrong, some of the things close by

were smaller than those set further back, so that though

we saw something, and saw it plain enough

we saw it nowhere, there wasn't any place

for it to be, or any place for us.

We wandered. Not quite aimless. Man here, though,

would live without biography: it needs

a time and place: there isn't any: who

could say, not smiling, me and my world

or so and so and his time, and stage a play

clothed properly in front of sets,

and believe that this made time and place of the world?

No, we have come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghost against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there. Where we are: nowhere. It is there.

The Poetry of William Bronk (1918 - 1999)

Some stanzas from The Force of Desire by William Bronk. (1979)
The slow, slow light in the winter sky
this very early morning assures us the world
is not the actual world. Never was.

The longing for God, in its intensity,
shares and suggests the power and intensity
of God's longing. And it is - but not for us.

The morning door is open to the outer world;
the pleasure of edges, clear shapes and names.
Its air is the sharp pain of your seperateness.

In human nature we look not for ourselves
But for what is there. We may be a clue
Though it is not certain. We know about false leads.

Truth has many forms which are not its form
if it has one. What has a form of its own
or, having, is only it? There is truth.

If our day-lives mattered at all, no
matter that we dream; but they don’t and the dream
is the life as if it mattered, as we dream it may.

There are some writings about Bronk's poetry here:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bronk/poetry.htm