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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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29.
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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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30.
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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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31.
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Requiescat
A hillock blisters the field of spread.
Black gold lies ready to yield its prize.
Zeus has sown his seed in this bed
And his son will soon astonish our eyes.
Rub it and listen! It begins to purr,
A genie slinks from his cloistered home,
A white snout first, then night of fur,
A nugget of truth from the formless loam.
This was our game: Id flip the spread
To hide that form curled up as if dead.
The ball is the term of the smiling mask.
Now to bury a stiffened corpse is my task.
And as the bleeding shreds of old day fade
A sun arises on that game we played.
Michael Buhagiar
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32.
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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
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