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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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29.
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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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30.
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Poets Don't Drink Coffee
The tickets collected with an hour to spare,
We stopped by the Mozart Café 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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31.
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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 god’s 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 peacock’s wings will soon unfurl
Till all subsides in a mindless swoon.
This hill’s 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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32.
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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: I’d 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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