Nineteen-Eighty-Six

If I had to put my finger on where this started,
it would instantly smudge across several sun-streaked days
in the summer of nineteen-eighty-six
when I was eight-and-three-quarters years of age. Like the day my father—
stupidly so much younger then than I am now—
belted me into the front seat of the Volkswagen Jetta and we set off
for Dublin Airport to meet his sister coming in from JFK,
stopping along the way at the Sheaf of Wheat for the Irish Independent,
which I spread open on my lap to find out
which World Cup game would come from Mexico today,
and Brazil against Algeria it was, and all of it, 
all of Central and South America and Africa and the Azteca Stadium, all of it
and all its colour and all its noise, 
held within its grip a transfixed boy in a small car in far-off Ireland.

Or the day of the quarter-finals, when grandparents, parents, siblings, me, 
meandered home from the small agony 
of a slow Sunday picnic at Mellifont Abbey and I rushed into the kitchen 
of the old house that now lies empty
to ask my uncle what’s the score. Still nil-nil it was, but then my world changed
and changed forever when Diego Maradona 
first raised his hand to heaven, and moments later, just in case his genius 
was in doubt, got the ball at the halfway line,
and started to run and ran past everyone, past Peter Shilton in the England goal 
and passed the ball to the net and took off 
for the corner flag, chest puffed out, having proved now what he’d always known 
and what the world would know now too: 
that where there is human there is wizard and god and devil
and everything else we can’t forget.