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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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25.
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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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26.
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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
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27.
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Poets Don't Drink Coffee
The tickets collected with an hour to spare,
We stopped by the Mozart Cafι in a shell
On the water, and took in the drinkers and rare
Miasma of fresh-roasted coffee bean smell.
How civilized! she said, in a tone of approval;
And I nodded, though really not sharing her ardour.
Then a tide I called took us out through a portal
To the wind and the gathering dark and the harbour.
Unearthly rapt faces surround a fire
Where one tells under stars of a hero who lapsed
And escaped in a shower of spears with the flame.
It once heated a bowl to force ever higher
A crystal of blue and deep green, now collapsed;
And I remember her face, though more sharply her name.
Michael Buhagiar
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28.
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Putney Park: Sunset Across the Water
A million pyres would be as a match
In hell to this raging sinking Lear.
Peninsular land lies ready to catch
The sky gods shimmering ruby tear.
How blue the depthless floor of space.
Are they lips, and do they sweetly sing
Soft breath in waves on my moveless face?
Or the ruffling beat of some passing wing.
The bay drifts wide like lambing flocks.
Dark peacocks wings will soon unfurl
Till all subsides in a mindless swoon.
This hills green arch is our private box.
Each tree is a rapt and graceful girl
Uplifting her cheeks to the archer moon.
Michael Buhagiar
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