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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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1.
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Before I Met You
Spring would come with shafts of light
To make love to dark earth in the morning dew,
But the frost would bite too deep at night
And the beds were all bare, before I met you.
To think of love was like shaking hands
With a friend whose name I no longer knew.
I would walk alone along moonlit strands
And gaze deep into rivers, before I met you.
Before I met you, my plans were as birds
Betrayed to snow as they blindly flew,
For want of the line of a song without words
To guide them on, before I met you.
Long absence would fall like a massive tor
Unseen each day from a cloudless blue,
As Id frozen stand before my dreadful door
To learn again what was deep and true.
My past was a perfect globe of gold
To where every day my dreaming flew,
And girls would my soul in their arms enfold
And say they loved me, before I met you.
Before I met you, my poems were as photos
Framed in wallets, and I would rue
The routine smiles and lifted brows,
And hold my gorgeous children from view,
Before I met you, and love was a pang
Whose blade struck deep, yet the weakest glue
I would crave to weep as Caruso sang,
Before I met you, before I met you.
Michael Buhagiar
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2.
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Correspondences (translation from Charles Baudelaire)
Nature is a temple whose columns are alive
And confusions of sounds at times betray.
Man through a forest of symbols does strive,
And he knows them somehow as he goes on his way.
Like long-sustained echoes far away
Moving in a oneness shadowy and profound,
Vast as the darkness and the day,
Perfumes and colours and sounds correspond.
There are perfumes fresh as the flesh of an infant,
Soft as an oboe, green as a prairie,
And others compounded, rich and triumphant,
Expanding somehow like a thing of infinity,
Like amber, musk, bergamot, and incense,
Which sing of transports of the spirit and sense.
Michael Buhagiar
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3.
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I Honestly Love You
If this vow of affection is simply true
Dont tell me why you had to speak it:
A spell was settling and you had to break it,
I know, for it would chill and entomb you.
A fate some ghost from your past was weaving,
Her lips once offered, then snatched away
Perhaps
A warmth whose feeling is believing,
That you sensed, before all, in the light of day.
No
like driftwood washed to an island
Where thick-rooted green sets free the bough,
You suffer in silence, and sing to me, now,
A lament for a time undead, at hand.
For truth, like poetry, must come from the heart,
As honest as tears that slip to the floor,
As plain to the sense as Cupids dart.
I hear truths beat, a wounded roar
That floods through your transparent art
To reach where waters surge and pore:
With open arms, and with knowing heart,
From here to forever, I come to your shore.
In memoriam Peter Allen
Michael Buhagiar
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4.
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Koala
In the long arms of mother let him sleep
With her eyes bent above
To gaze through locks that steep
And guard from the skys rough love
As heat he inflicts without care
Or showers more than enough.
Soon, of hunger deep aware,
He may wake and take his fill,
Then sleep, a bulging bear.
One day may fall a chill
And a glacier creep, when
Full turn comes the wheel of the mill,
Or a sea fill that valley again,
Or chunk hot plummet from the deep;
Yet come what may, until then
In the long arms of mother let him sleep.
Michael Buhagiar
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