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Best Poems From
MICHAEL BUHAGIAR
(13 January 1954)
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29.
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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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30.
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Rymbonao
For Jessica on the occasion of her twenty-first 7 Oct 2006
The years are numbered twenty-one
Since Jessica saw the day;
Dead time of ice, then the starters gun
Would send the sun away.
The sun is a chariot drawn by steeds
That sweeps across the sky,
And in the hands of a hero rich with deeds
The golden reins do lie.
To us, the watchers in poor seats,
The length of course we see
Shrinks as nights old flood defeats
The light that once was free.
And then, in the awful deep abyss,
Day will burst his chains,
And spring the season of colour to kiss
Till only love remains.
One day the charioteer must die,
The race be run no more;
The car in rust and pieces lie,
And closed the stable door.
A remnant light the empty track
Till eyes and it expire;
The swing that sectored forth and back
At nadir climb no higher.
Yet far off in some land unknown
On some dark troubled shore,
The drivers coffin lid may grown
And creak the stable door;
The racecourse rise with stands again
And fill unto the brim
With watchers tense and tall with strain
To cheer the burning Him.
Michael Buhagiar
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31.
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Sadness of the Moon (Tristesse de la Lune) : translation
A more langorous moon is dreaming this night:
Like a beauty on several cushions reposing
Who caresses with a hand discreet and light
The contour of her breasts before the closing
Of sleep, on those soft avalanches satined
Back, dying, she is given to rapture,
And roams her eyes on the visions twinned
That ascend like blossoms, white into azure.
When sometimes she lets fall, in her dreaming bound,
A furtive tear to this earthly ground,
A poet - stranger to sleep she has won -
Will catch that dropp in the palm of his hand,
Of irissy refractions, like a fragment of opal, and
Put it in his heart, out of sight of the sun.
by Charles Baudelaire
trans. by Michael Buhagiar
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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