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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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1.
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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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2.
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Sadness of the Moon (Tristesse de la Lune) : translation
A more langorous moon is dreaming this night:
Like a beauty on several cushions reposing
Who caresses with a hand discreet and light
The contour of her breasts before the closing
Of sleep, on those soft avalanches satined
Back, dying, she is given to rapture,
And roams her eyes on the visions twinned
That ascend like blossoms, white into azure.
When sometimes she lets fall, in her dreaming bound,
A furtive tear to this earthly ground,
A poet - stranger to sleep she has won -
Will catch that dropp in the palm of his hand,
Of irissy refractions, like a fragment of opal, and
Put it in his heart, out of sight of the sun.
by Charles Baudelaire
trans. by Michael Buhagiar
Michael Buhagiar
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3.
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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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4.
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Light My Fire (Homage to Jim Morrison 2)
Let the Shadow inflict collateral damage
On Venus who alights from a shell to the shore
To light your fire as the chill winds rage
And vipers strike from the blossomless floor;
And let the Shadows gunships even pound
The trees that surge as the fresh year blooms
And the land and the folk who, all seasons round,
Within stony walls find precarious rooms:
It is the door, the door, strong hewn from oak
Whose roots strike deep as the head branch soars,
Lets pass fresh air or forbids the strafe.
And if its hinge should fail those rooms would choke
Or lodging be given to thundering boars,
As the round dances on in the valleys of Alph.
Michael Buhagiar
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