Paul Jeffcutt has won thirty-three awards for poetry in competitions in Ireland, the UK and the USA. He has two collections: ‘The Skylark’s Call’, Dempsey & Windle (2020) and ‘Latch’, Lagan Press (2010). He is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Paul lives in Co Down, Northern Ireland.

Beware the Time of Noah

After a message nailed to a tree near Belfast

Lashing, teeming, bucketing down,
torrents hammer inky slates,
sloshing into gutter seas.

Darkened taxi snouts the waves
to shabby pool of tinkling light –
another for the road?

Dispatched down a lane-way,
sodden memorial blooms
lie spent and wasting.

Good Friday’s spring tide
ebbs, sweet-wrappers frothing,
leaky hopes scuppered again.

A periscope scans refugee streets,
convoys of terraces holed in action –
illustrated gables shudder and groan,
going down, all dogs baying.

The Boss

Behind his sleek mahogany desk
lie framed diplomas and honours,
an expanse of gilding, signatures and red wax seals
he loves to gesture towards,
sprawling back in a buttoned leather chair
as you remain standing.

All phoney, confides the janitor,
especially one as a fighter pilot in Vietnam –
seizing the joystick, he presses the trigger
and four cannons spurt hot lead,
then he dissolves to a pouting bambino,
waving chubby little arms
and gaping around the cockpit.

Curtain Boar *

All sorts he’s covered:
downy and pink, smooth as an ear,
warted and reeking of the ditch.
Wains by the thousands,
curious tails and handy snouts,
squabbling for the teat –
eight weeks and they’re away,
never the merest glance.

Down the yard, a skiff of rain,
the lane-way to the foreshore
and the furthest lands.
His house gets smaller.

* A beast that has lost interest in sex, rendering it of no use to a pig farmer.
It would be sent to the abattoir.

Directions *

Go ye north
one day and one night
with fair wind and full sail
to isles broken by narrow sounds
swarming with sea-fowl.

Beach thyself
turn the boat for shelter
take mussels and sweet-water.
Remain forty months
observe thy vows.

Forget northern raiders
who care only for ale and gold
be as the high sun
who hides a little in the night
and the west wind
who scours the land clean
save for great stones that rear
many hands into the sky.

* Written on Papa Westray, one of the smallest and remotest of the Orkney Islands.
The Norse word ‘papa’, meaning monk or priest, is a common island name in Orkney,
Shetland and the Outer Hebrides.