Parthian Books

one believes a seed will become a flower until they see it bloom.

No one believes a seed will become a flower until they see it bloom. Some people will need to see it happen a hundred times and even then, they’ll have their doubts.

I, Ġ użeppi Marija Mifsud from Valletta, son of Pawla and Salvu, proletarian and committed Socialist although I have never read the red books (because those are blacklisted by our Mother the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church and because I don’t have a head for difficult, evil books, though I do know how to read a little), soldier of the Second World War assigned to the anti-aircraft cannon to defend my homeland from the air assaults of the fascist Italian bastards and the Nazi pigs, risking my life for my homeland, for the family entrusted to my care by the grace of God, with tattoos on my arm because I’m a proletarian soldier – a corporal at first, then a sergeant in the King’s Own Malta Regiment and the Royal Malta Artillery in Bigi and Tignè – my skin blistered by white-hot steel, toiling as I had always done since childhood after my mother was widowed for the second time, running about the streets wearing only one shoe in order to make the pair last longer, taking on whatever jobs I could find to support my mother and my younger siblings and

becoming a man as men are supposed to be, a hymn to barefooted humanity and an inspiration for the Workers’ Movement, living and dying and taking aim at the enemy flying overhead in aeroplanes intent on blowing my head off, becoming, existing, being.

At the age of eighty-seven, Lord, you summoned me unto you.
Ġ użeppi Marija Mifsud, also known as il-Kikkra , The Cup.
Now, son let’s see if you can guess this one: from her lips a kiss you stole, with your finger in her hole.

thinking that you might perhaps be talking about this girl I was with last night when I was supposed to be at the mass for the First Friday of the month. The Cup

No shortness of breath, in spite of all the cigarettes you smoke; you’re able to dive to the very bottom of the bay below Xg ħ ajra Tower to bring up sea urchins. Scores of sea urchins in the wicker basket.

They reek of the sea. The smell of sea urchins is alien to me and I’ve never been down to Xg ħ ajra Tower and those dark depths scare me. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of a lot of things: of the cemetery you take me to every other Sunday;

Socialist stalwarts who would troop past our place escorting minister Lorry or minister Grima; of the vindictive state apparatus that transferred you to a different post at work because you couldn’t keep your trap shut and spoke your mind; of the dream I used to dream every night of a moribund man whom I watched as he lay dying, a doll falling out from under his bed just as he breathed his last; of the shadow that doggedly pursued me (that’s what you used to tell me: You’re afraid of your own shadow! ); and above all: of you.

the grasshoppers that leap among the hundred-leaved roses in the corner of our yard; of the tortoise you smuggled