He said to throw our nets and rods
the other side of the boat—
a little guy, only yay high
walking on the surf like he could float.
He looked like his feet were the water
or something beneath held him up—
like he was a son of the plaster
a flicking paint piece from the stars.
So somebody let him walk on water
that God first painted on the sand.
He said we should throw our nets over,
I said, “What’ve we got left now?”
The fish, I mean it was high season
but we hadn’t caught diddly squat
in a month—I figured with his toes feeling
the water he’d know what was what.
But the deck was on fire with them,
there was more fish than we could stand.
The deck was washed with fins and scales,
more than you’d raise with any pair of hands.
We looked at him walk away,
kicking the tide like it was sand.
“Where are you teaching?” I called after him.
“You’ll hear about it,” he laughed.
So we put down or nets and ran.
The water closed over our heads like a storm.
We never saw such fish again,
not even when we went for bigger game.
by Atar Hadari
Atar Hadari is an award-winning playwright and poet. His latest heroic act is submitting a PhD thesis in Theology at Liverpool Hope University on ‘Traces of the Jewish Commentators in William Tyndale’s Translation of Deuteronomy and its Revisions to 1611’.
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