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- Editorial
- ESSAY: 'Malta’s Jonah Complex' by Antoine Cassar
- ESSAY: Incongruity and Scale by Ivan Callus
- ESSAY: Writing on the Edge by Raphael Vella
- ESSAY: Mute Stage by Simone Spiteri
- ESSAY: On approaching a language from outside its crèche by Walid Nabhan
- PROSE: Monologue of the gravedigger by Clare Azzopardi
- PROSE: Four days by Immanuel Mifsud
- PROSE: I want to call out to Samirah by Pierre J. Mejlak
- PROSE: Gerita by Trevor Żahra
- PROSE: Everything is not by Walid Nabhan
- POETRY: Mario Azzopardi
- POETRY: Norbert Bugeja
- POETRY: Antoine Cassar
- POETRY: Joe Friggieri
- POETRY: Simone Galea
- POETRY: Adrian Grima
- POETRY: Maria Grech Ganado
- POETRY: Simone Inguanez
- POETRY: Nadia Mifsud
- POETRY: Albert Marshall
POETRY: Adrian Grima
Mostar
He shows no mercy in the fight, Rafel.
The air is thick with spears and swords.
Over their horses, the wrathful, stiff as dolls,
keel over.
On the field of battle,
they hoarsely gasp their agonising last
like actors.
In the lull brimming with fury from the fight
dead soldiers, wounded horses swiftly come to,
rise to their feet, begin to walk again.
Although so much brutality has happened,
Rafel prepares the ground for new engagements:
the two sides facing off across the way.
A presage of the din that means disaster,
of swords piercing the breath of those they slay.
And now, the baddies’ gasps are even hoarser,
the goodies’ horses spry amid the fray.
Rafel abruptly leaves. The air implodes.
All are suspended, cast aside like dolls.
Her Photograph Everywhere
I
She’s
not
posing on the marble shelf
where
I sleep
the
four-year-old girl who perished.
Not
smiling.
Looking
sideways,
beyond
us,
future observers.
Hair
the
colour of tousled gold
caught
in a
tale without explanation.
The
photo
catches her serious look,
the
red,
green and yellow of her bathing costume
swimming
into
each other.
While
her
aunt reads a summer book behind her,
she
looks
apprehensive,
as if
she’s
glimpsed a storm ahead.
II
I wish
I
could see her pass,
or
hear her
call,
from
the
other room.
Come
in
tired, with her school bag
and
her voice
rushing
to
give an
earnest account of the day.
Then
smile
and tell of the star
shining
proudly
on her work ...
III
She’s everywhere,
in every corridor,
in every room
lit up.
Her face, in
a baby’s wool cap of Tibetan colours,
looking at
us;
a few months
old in her mother’s lap
by the sea,
her brother
in his bathing costume and she
wearing white
and a bonnet
as if in Little House on the Prairie.
The
same
dress –
perhaps
with
the same camera –
in her
father’s hands. He smiles at her and she looks at us.
And
now she’s
walking,
wrapped
up
warm, in a museum with her brother and mother.
In her
father’s arms, while he plays the fool:
she
reaches
to touch him and laughs, he draws back
(no
photograph needed here):
a
moment
captured, completely, in her hands.
IV
In the
dining
room, there’s a painting of her older.
Seated at the
table
you're seized
by her bright
eyes, a fresh forest submerged,
a glance, a
secret acknowledged;
the assertive
colour of her clothes;
the sunlight
caught in her ruffled hair;
the stems of
incandescent green she clutches;
the
disconcerting redness of her lips.
Then they come
for me,
I pull my bag
behind me and leave.
But there’s
no interval between us,
no distance,
and I keep
looking for that sun
in the story
of her eyes.