|
|
|
Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
|
|
| |
|
|
25.
|
In the Ebor Cemetery
From zero to zero an ice wind sweeps
As dark chords close the movement of day,
And the sky a mist of moisture weeps
On the loved one beached in a wave-lashed bay.
A two-barred fence defines the square
And gums on every side surround,
Here in the heart of the country where
There comes no faintest human sound.
In this stone all night the wild winds wail
As lightning jags through flattening rain,
And spitting cobras lash the rim.
And this graven name is a thinnest veil
A deathless heart through which shines plain;
These flowers, a gallery hung with him.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
26.
|
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
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
27.
|
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
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
28.
|
Not Diving, but Drowning
In psychiatry term in medical school
There were some who genuinely loved the schizophrenics
In their condition of perpetually living the Fool
Which Freud nor drugs nor volts could fix.
Not the victims of a personal alien hostility
Who had buried an axe, as may be, in a head;
But those who had grasped the live electricity
And stuck fast screaming, and still felt its dread.
To the ice-bound fields of sequestered valleys
Those lovers were born, who to dig now yearn,
Yet the livewire cables still lie deep out of reach.
While others, they have heard, make daily sallies
To drink of that fire, and their flesh does not burn,
And the earth as they rise tumbles into the breach.
Michael Buhagiar
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|