Echo Point 3: Palimpsest Poem by Michael Buhagiar

Stone, the emblem of the timeless become space
- Oswald Spengler

Her top drawer is a tip of blister packs,
All used, and blazoned ‘Serepax’.
The foils that hid their moonseed gifts
Lie torn and curled like autumn drifts.
Lucy Summers, tenured historian,
Turns another page; her blue eyes scan
The faded writing shaped across parchment.
It tells, in French, of the hero’s bent
To saunter at ease through meadows amid
Daisy plush, while dreaming of Euclid
And smiling in bliss at the birds of the air
And the coats of pretty colours the butterflies wear,
As the blue sky soars overhead without stain.
And she dreams she is him, and there comes yet again
Cold fear, galloping unreined and loud.

Now she sees, like a bright moon through cloud
Peeping, a line traversing an O.
She looks again, and the pages show
A field thick with clues…
She begins to reap,
And discovers the story of a mountain steep
With a stream that grows to a mighty current
Which flows through sunlit towns, till rent
By rocks, then plunges from cliffs to the sea,
And ascends to rain on the peak again…
Ecstasy
Reigns, as she reads—in her mind’s disjoint—
C’est finie, cette histoire d’or que j’appelle ‘Echo Pont’.
And as she gazes on an inner vista in awe,
She swoons, and knocks the pills to the floor,
And a full moon rises, smouldering, red,
Where no seed will burst again in its bed.