Three times the poem says the same thing, and each time the sentence stops just short of finishing: "There isn't enough light until we bring ourselves." Bring ourselves where? To what? Doug Palmer never says, and that gap is the heart of the piece. Light here is not handed to us. It stays insufficient until people show up fully, as themselves.
The opening sets out a journey in tentative terms. "Now we have started / to come back" describes a return, not an arrival. Then comes a knot of words that refuses to settle: "the fast is longing." A fast can be religious abstinence, hunger turned into yearning, or it can mean speed, and both senses suit "longing." The next line is stranger: "the light of cast foreshadows all else." "Cast" could be a shadow cast, a throw, a mould. Setting it beside "light" and then using the verb "foreshadows" puts a shadow inside the very word for brightness, so light and dark arrive together. Then: "We are bent upon it, upon the way." "Bent" means both determined and stooped over, and the poem seems to want both, resolve and humility. In the text as given, commas sometimes crowd against the next word ("it,upon", "once,that"), which adds to the sense of hurry.
There is no regular rhyme or metre. This is free verse, built from short, speech-like lines. "Fast" and "cast" do rhyme, though, and because nothing else does, the rhyme clicks like a latch. The refrain behaves differently from everything around it. It is the longest line in the poem, and its plain words ("There isn't enough light until we bring ourselves") move at a steady, almost walking pace. The surrounding lines are broken and short, so the refrain works like a post that the fragments circle.
The most interesting moment is the instruction "Say it only once, that you may know." The poem then repeats the line twice more. It either breaks its own rule or suggests that saying something and knowing it are different things, and that knowing means enacting it again and again. Repetition turns the poem into something like a litany, and a reader who reaches the third refrain has felt the idea rather than just read it. The punctuation supports this. The first two refrains have no full stop and hang open, while the last one closes with a period. That lets "ourselves" be the final word, as if the self were the thing finally delivered.
The second half grows more devotional. "Still" stands alone, meaning both motionless and even so. "For caught up in the wind," opens a clause that is never completed, and "caught up" suggests being swept away, perhaps in rapture. Then: "we stand before, / we have knelt that way." Once again the sentence ends on a word that needs an object ("before" what?) and doesn't get one. Fasting, longing, kneeling, "the way" and light all belong to the language of prayer. Judging by the imagery, the poem seems to describe a kind of unnamed worship, and keeping the object of reverence blank lets readers supply their own.
The title, "Poems Written Out of William Carlos Williams 1," and the date, October 25, 1966, are the only context we are given. The title suggests the poem grew out of Palmer's reading of Williams, and the numeral hints at a series. Williams is generally associated with plain speech and spare, broken lines, and Palmer's everyday vocabulary and short stanzas fit that. This is an inference from the title, not a documented influence. I know nothing else reliably about Palmer, and the poem doesn't need it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it demands what it describes. Its sentences keep stopping before their objects, so the reader has to step into the gap and complete them, which is exactly what the refrain asks. The poem withholds the destination, the object of kneeling and the place we are meant to bring ourselves to, so that the only thing left to bring is ourselves. A poem about insufficient light ends up depending on the person reading it to supply the rest.