Michael Buhagiar

Let the Shadow inflict collateral damage
On Venus who alights from a shell to the shore
To light your fire as the chill winds rage
And vipers strike from the blossomless floor;
...

Spring would come with shafts of light
To make love to dark earth in the morning dew,
But the frost would bite too deep at night
And the beds were all bare, before I met you.
...

A seed once fell onto English terrain
Where wars had thicked the soil with much blood;
And its roots struck deep into Satan’s brain
On the side where feeling and melody bud.
...

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.
...

If this vow of affection is simply true
Don’t tell me why you had to speak it:
A spell was settling and you had to break it,
I know, for it would chill and entomb you.
...

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
...

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,
...

Nature is a temple whose columns are alive
And confusions of sounds at times betray.
Man through a forest of symbols does strive,
And he knows them somehow as he goes on his way.
...

In the long arms of mother let him sleep
With her eyes bent above
To gaze through locks that steep
...

(In Fisher Library, University of Sydney)


The floors to the top are numbered five
...

The birds sit ranged along the tree’s high limb
As day slips back into thickening dark,
Their twig toes gripping the still warm bark,
And massed cries wailing in ecstatic hymn.
...

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.
...

He glanced at the first bright sliver to glow
Which many would harvest and worship alone,
And yawned, thinking only of how she would grow
To the diva as Woman entrancing the throne.
...

Towers, turrets, high walls all made
Of sand gold-gleaming in noonday rays…
He would send his son with bucket and spade
To build and build under stringent gaze.
...

It starts with a seed, whose segments gather
A trust protecting the wealth of their ancestry
With promise of flowers and a soaring majesty
And fruits to ravish you, like any other;
...

A solitary cannon to the sunset points.
Idle gunners talk and smoke
And hook their heels in the sandstone’s joints
In a world the gaping centuries cloak.
...

A huge propeller, shed like Palinurus,
Overlies a ridge or river-bed
Whose dusty fissures fill the canvas,
On its triad of rusty blades the faded
...

The gentle rain these sad gardens drink
To the harbour beyond goes home again,
As street lamps and orange foglights prink
The gentle rain.
...

A light breeze rustles the leaves; so calm
They sit perched along the weathered arm
Ruffling downs, or suddenly they stab
At some enemy marching sharply within.
...

Is still alive at fifty: clean of heroin,
Yet acid back then helped scour the eye
Of scum that sees two lovers sin:
The one hell-black, the other sky.
...