|
|
|
Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
|
|
| |
|
|
5.
|
I Honestly Love You
If this vow of affection is simply true
Don’t 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 Cupid’s dart.
I hear truth’s 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
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
6.
|
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 sky’s 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
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
7.
|
Echo Point 3: Palimpsest
Stone, the emblem of the timeless become space
- Oswald Spengler
Her top drawer is a tip of blister packs,
All used, and blazoned ‘Serepax’.
The foils that hid their moonseed gifts
Lie torn and curled like autumn drifts.
Lucy Summers, tenured historian,
Turns another page; her blue eyes scan
The faded writing shaped across parchment.
It tells, in French, of the hero’s bent
To saunter at ease through meadows amid
Daisy plush, while dreaming of Euclid
And smiling in bliss at the birds of the air
And the coats of pretty colours the butterflies wear,
As the blue sky soars overhead without stain.
And she dreams she is him, and there comes yet again
Cold fear, galloping unreined and loud.
Now she sees, like a bright moon through cloud
Peeping, a line traversing an O.
She looks again, and the pages show
A field thick with clues…
She begins to reap,
And discovers the story of a mountain steep
With a stream that grows to a mighty current
Which flows through sunlit towns, till rent
By rocks, then plunges from cliffs to the sea,
And ascends to rain on the peak again…
Ecstasy
Reigns, as she reads—in her mind’s disjoint—
C’est finie, cette histoire d’or que j’appelle ‘Echo Pont’.
And as she gazes on an inner vista in awe,
She swoons, and knocks the pills to the floor,
And a full moon rises, smouldering, red,
Where no seed will burst again in its bed.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
8.
|
Logos
Facing my bed in the peaceful room
Of my grandparents’ brick suburban home
A painted smiling Jesus hung,
As salves so many a Catholic’s doom.
A bearded young man, haloed gnome,
To the wall and my gaze serenely clung.
His chest, exposed in bloodless surgery,
The Sacred Heart showed, ensconced in flame,
While two paling fingers to the sky were held
As the King and Priest in closest amity.
Around the crescent base of the oval frame,
‘The Lord is my Salvation’ was starkly spelled.
Well, though only a pup, I clung to that bone:
That monster ‘-ation’, how might I speak?
O fruit that hangs on the groaning tree,
Or in the fabled ark lies carved in stone,
In labouring waves the near light you seek
From the silent page, which gave life to me.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|