Margaret Gillies Brown has had eight collections of poetry published {Outposts, Akros, Poetry Scotland, Argyll, Blind Serpent} and three books of prose {Argyll}. She emigrated to Canada in the late 1950s but returned to a Scottish farm where she still lives. She has been a member of Scottish PEN for over 25 years.'Emigrant Journey' was first published in her third collection of poetry Hares On The Horizon (Outposts).
Emigrant Journey
There was the comfort and the all mod-con of home
with its recognisable dangers:
there was the journey,
the endless coming on of the same wave,
the no land time of ocean and high hopes
until the icebergs rose -
snow-white palaces.
There were the moving days
and weary nights of train hours overland,
the trees, the lakes, the straight and rolling plains
until time stopped in sheer fantasy
of a pre-dawn winter morning -
gloved hand swinging the iron-hard handle
of a frozen water pump
at the edge of a bark-rough cabin:
Above the sky moving, strange magnificence,
voile curtains of colour
changing, shifting imperceptibly.
I tried to wake from unreality,
felt my spine freeze,
heard coyotes howling down the night.
Margaret Gillies Brown
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