Michael McNaught

A Sonnet in Remembrance of Barry Stroud

Inside the span subtending endless night,
a man uncloses wide the newborn eye,
beholds his own becoming, purled and bright,
as one submerged who, rising, sees a sky. Engendered in that blind, umbilic deep,
whence, lightward, life’s inborn persistings bloom, the call to know our state in custom’s keep
did in his conscience like polaris loom;
and by its guiding glow in time he gleaned
there was no here or there, no sea or air,
or billowed blue damascus steel between:
there are but fables and their thoroughfares.
How rare—where gone?—this man thus shined upon, for him to be for me the one that shone.