Tom Blake
I was eating some kind of maize snack from a bowl.
It was suspiciously yellow and made my fingers reek
of fish oil, though the snack itself had little in the way
of flavour. The man next to me looked up at the TV
screen just as I looked up at the TV screen. Well
how about that, the TV screen seemed to say, reflecting
both of us simultaneously, though of course neither
of us could see our reflections, what with the screen
being suspended a couple of metres above us in the corner
of the bar. Can I tell you something about the Hand of God,
said the man. I mean the very specific Hand of God
belonging to one Diego Armando Maradona, or rather
belonging to God, but made flesh on the end of the arm
of Maradona. The Hand of God must be understood
to be a real hand, he said, a literal and physical intervention
on the part of a deity who moves, as they say, in mysterious
ways, though not that mysterious: there is no mystery
in wanting the English to lose. Here the man laughed,
a scratchy kind of laugh that you might expect from
an anthropomorphic chicken or a scarecrow. We’re
fundamentally different, he continued. Where you see
miracles as metaphors, we see them as matter. My God
enacted an instantaneous transmutation, invisible to
the naked eye, which meant that for a moment no
longer than the shortest length of time a human
can conceive of, Diego Armando Maradona’s hand
was truly God’s hand. If you could slow down time
so much that it starts to reverse, you might notice
a bright aura around that hand. Except of course you
wouldn’t, because for you the Hand of God was not,
how shall we put it, real. For you it was an excuse,
or rather a complex of excuses: an excuse for your
team losing, a perceived excuse for our team cheating.
But this isn’t the case: we won because our miracles
are solid, because our bread and wine really is the body
and the blood. You lost because your miracles are
tragic poems squealed by the glorified barkers on TV.
See that TV screen? We both expect something from it,
but what you expect is very different from what I expect.
What I’m saying is stop seeing life as a tragic poem,
we have tragic poems for that.
Tom Blake is a poet and music journalist based in the south-west of England. He has two chapbooks out with The Red Ceilings Press: Ƨ (2023) and Peach Epoch (2025). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene, Confluence and Perverse, and he is a regular contributor to KLOF magazine.
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