|
|
|
Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
|
|
| |
|
|
13.
|
Homage to Eric Clapton
A seed once fell onto English terrain
Where wars had thicked the soil with much blood;
And its roots struck deep into Satans brain
On the side where feeling and melody bud.
And it thrust through years like a rebel army
Though deserted by sun and the rain close behind;
And a luthier culled one of its strongest rami
To craft an instrument with Segovia in mind.
Now the southwind spurs its belly, and there rears
Chaliapin, Sinatra, Caruso, all capped
By a song that crowns like cream the milch tree;
And a dark and haggard dryad appears
From a bole and croaks it is Clapton trapped,
And by the soaring topmost branch set free.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
14.
|
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
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
15.
|
Sound of Silence
Each lecture hall was a book of hours,
Its pages written by different priests.
We plunged to engage the dismal powers
And gazed from the decks of dawning towers,
In a year endowed with moveable feasts.
I kept an inward mental table
Where to every priest I gave a cell:
A heaven-kissing Tower of Babel
Whose apex held a thoroughbred stable
Of Pegasus-seekers who had come back from hell.
To suffer meekly is to kill creativity:
The camel must grow to a lion, then child.
The laurel-bearers, we were growing in gravity
Yet prowling the stage for the likely absurdity,
Often swelling in uproar, like a grandstand gone wild.
One there was only, a Phar Lap and Daniel
Who so shone that Ssshh! was our loudest word;
Hissed sidelong, as a cancerous cell
Was borne on the charm of a whispered spell,
As gift from the isle of his rapture profferred.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
16.
|
The Witch Muse (Homage to Eric Clapton 2)
He glanced at the first bright sliver to glow
Which many would harvest and worship alone,
And yawned, thinking only of how she would grow
To the diva as Woman entrancing the throne.
He would watch her crowned, her husband-tide
Now brimming, now void, and the kingdom thriving;
The infant Prince on her lap spread wide:
While still the Acts through not wholly believing.
The backdropp of black is their shadow play.
Now the Queen is dead; there creeps from the shadows
A hag, black-cowled, to claim centre stage
With a wail as if suns at the death of day
Were fuelling in her ribs a lyric of crows.
He gazed till the stage went out into umbrage.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|