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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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25.
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Jacob's Ladder
(In Fisher Library, University of Sydney)
The floors to the top are numbered five
Where shelves of Shakespeare live;
Ten flights of stairs where I might strive
For the fruits high branches give.
A lift runs up, and I could choose
To give these legs a rest,
And save the time I else would loose
On that small Everest.
Yet climb I always do, in mood
Of scaling mountain sides,
With snow and shelves of rock endued,
Nor hung with carriage-rides.
Michael Buhagiar
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26.
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Logos
Facing my bed in the peaceful room
Of my grandparents brick suburban home
A painted smiling Jesus hung,
As salves so many a Catholics 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
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27.
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Love, Hope, Belief
On the painting by Anselm Keifer
(Germany,1945-) in the Art Gallery of NSW.
A huge propeller, shed like Palinurus,
Overlies a ridge or river-bed
Whose dusty fissures fill the canvas,
On its triad of rusty blades the faded
Inscription: Liebe, Hoffnung, Glaube.
Also hes depicted Siegfried Superman
Relieving a cesspool of its toy Excalibur;
The goal of his long march to dawn
In bleeding fire; halts who would inherit
Hermann, hero of the Roman clashes;
The seven-tongued menorah alight
In a triumph-crypt encrusted with ashes;
Walkers-on-water; and strutting cocks
Compelling the seas and the sun in flight:
Persisting away at the black-box
Of a ship of dreams dashed out of sight.
Michael Buhagiar
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28.
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Nostos
The birds sit ranged along the trees high limb
As day slips back into thickening dark,
Their twig toes gripping the still warm bark,
And massed cries wailing in ecstatic hymn.
Should the storm god louring from rim to rim
Shower his drenching midnight cark,
The leaves would remain their sheltering ark,
Or walls against the tempests savage whim.
The watcher is those havened birds somehow;
And someone else that rooted nest,
Someone warm out of long ago
Who nursed him next a swollen breast,
And, with fall of hair, to a singing slow,
Rocked as fire burned low in the west.
Michael Buhagiar
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