When I first saw Gordon he was reading for a B.A. (Hons) in English at the University of Malta. The baseball cap pulled perpetually low over his forehead screamed “Let me be!”. I understood that wasn’t the time to intrude on his privacy, which was a pity because when we did meet we realised we had much in common, not least an iconoclastic sense of humour.

Everyone now remembers Gordon primarily for his brave disability activism: struggling against constantly failing health to improve the lot of his disabled peers through the removal of socially constructed barriers.

However, we who knew and loved him recognised in Gordon the soul of a deep thinker and poet. Gordon was sensitive almost to a fault experiencing very keenly not only his own pain, but the emotions of all those closest to him. He worried about all of us.

He wrestled hard with the deeper questions of existence and the injustice of his own condition and all the while he tried to clothe his thoughts in memorable words. One of my favourite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, was, like Gordon, blind and physically frail; both poured their limited energies and boundless imagination into short, pithy literary forms: Borges, exquisitely woven short-stories and poems, Gordon, into painfully sincere haikus.

We shall miss him terribly, but we take joy in the fact that he counted us among his closest friends. Gordon was much more than the sum of his disabled parts, he doesn’t need a hagiographer to sing his praises: his merits leap out of every piece he wrote.

Here he is speaking for himself:

A boy who dreamt

There was a boy who dreamt of being a writer.

The boy became a man.

The dream faded for long. Until now...

I cry in silence

I cry in silence,

Unseen tears of the soul,

A soul still in chains …

I am nobody...

Let me live my life.

Don't tell me who I should be.

For I am nobody.

Endings

The pain is still there.

And as for my suffering ...

I know it will end.

The Fruits of Life

Pleasures never last.

Embrace life as it unfolds.

Be compassionate.

Rising Spirits

Nature stood still

As the peaceful spirits rose

From their earthly bonds.

The Promise of Ends

Good and bad fruit die,

Joy follows sorrow. Life, death,

Ends have beginnings.

Farewell to a Friend

These happy moments,

Learning together. Have passed.

Precious memories.

Joe Camilleri

Mdina