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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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13.
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Echo Point 1: Echo Point, The Blue Mountains
Stone, the emblem of the timeless become space
- Oswald Spengler
The Three Sisters sing ‘You Can’t Hurry Love.’
The floor spreads out in rolling waves,
All tidal pulses and sailors’ graves,
And swells of broccoli carpet above.
The cliffs surge into awestruck view,
Like planes of war on a carrier’s deck
That once hid in its vast infernal neck
Till lips convulsed to gape and spew.
Persephone blooms from hell to the air.
The gravedigger climbs an invisible stair
To the stage, in each rustic hand a long bone,
And grinning strikes a lively tune
On a row of skulls, as the theatre’s stone
Looms raw, as if for a cathedral hewn.
Michael Buhagiar
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14.
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Echo Point 2: Tragedy
Stone, the emblem of the timeless become space
- Oswald Spengler
Why does the ghostly father flee
When dawn on Hamlet’s terror breaks?
It is the isles of cliffs from the blue leaf sea
Surging like golden-hooded snakes.
And why does Ophelia spurn his letters?
Why is he tortured north north west?
He has kept the cliffs of gold in fetters
And now they rebel to shatter his rest.
Why does the broad sword of Pyrrhus smash
Time and again old Priam’s skull,
His grey hairs and bones and brains to mash,
And his years of inner peace to annul?
It is the cliffs of gold so deeply cowed
Beneath the ghostly father’s fist,
Gushing like water hissing loud
From the ruptured skin of some occult cyst.
Rosencrantz is dead, and Guildenstern
Too, destroyed by their own device:
A garland of roses his hard hands spurn,
To the star of gold his eyes are ice:
A nought that would his quaking neck grip tight,
A sun stretch out its gold cliff hands
To guide him up to the shimmering light
From the fetid crypt where Onan stands.
Why does the dagger pause unthrust
As Claudius bends his back to his prayers,
Whose words pile up like stirless dust
As no dream in the careless heavens flares?
It is the cliffs of gold in the naked steel
Surging like a prick from its wrinkled hood,
Which Hamlet’s loins must never feel,
Such is the father’s fear of wood.
The old man behind the hanging lurks
As Hamlet fires the faggots of speech:
The forge of the gypsy poet works
Cliffs that yearn to the heavens to reach.
The flames lick up toward Gertrude’s eyes
Where, deep within, the cliffs glow gold
Like the face of a painted whore that lies.
Now his pants the bulging tackle hold
As the blade thrusts through the silky flesh
To fish the old man from virtual sleep,
A monster calf in a Cretan crèche
He feeds with blood as the teeth strike deep.
What is the gift the pearl fishers brought
Which rests at the bottom of Gertrude’s cup?
It is the cliffs of gold Ulysses caught
In the blue leaf sea, and ferried up.
Though flames may lick and winds abrade
And the hammer of Thor enraged pound,
The cliffs of gold must never degrade
To the seed that falls on stony ground.
Why does the ghostly father flee
When dawn on Hamlet’s terror breaks?
From the cliffs of gold he shrinks to see
The truth that slack the old codpiece makes.
Michael Buhagiar
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15.
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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
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16.
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Echo Point 4: Theme in a Bass Clef
Stone, the emblem of the timeless become space
- Oswald Spengler
What do the isles of cliffs encode
Placed like studs of gold with such art
That this velvet shows an endless road
To the eye that quests for the hidden heart?
It is this, the secret heart of the matter,
Rising from the sunless depths of the sea
That the Holy Grail within may utter
The Word of God from its every tree.
Thus, the palimpsest yawns the planes to disgorge,
And the roar they make is the gravedigger’s song,
And the flames of Gertrude’s faggots forge
A bomb that for rudeness of cliffs atones.
For the cliffs are dark when drowned below,
But, lifting their cheeks to the sun, they glow.
Michael Buhagiar
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