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Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
P.ublished 25th July 2026
arts
Poem Of The Week: Dicks By Eoghan Walls
Dicks
There was little on which we did not draw a dick,
compassing grey paint off lockers, etching desks,
but mostly inking each other’s files or textbooks,
apostles casting cocks across the Sea of Galilee,
Tybalt shaking terrible showers onto poor Juliet,
dark colossi swung over relief maps of Gallipoli,
some veiny and ridged, some rushed as signatures.
As if we sprayed our own marks across the world,
blue tears of spunk upon black-and-white empires.
Not like the shower-room, where we held towels
in puppet shows over our small clusters of berries,
scuttling into the scalding water like guineafowl.
Even Big Gerry, who we all knew swung the strap
of a full-grown man, would cave in round himself
if Mr Gallagher scraped his boots on the doorstop.
There was little on which we did not draw a dick,
compassing grey paint off lockers, etching desks,
but mostly inking each other’s files or textbooks,
apostles casting cocks across the Sea of Galilee,
Tybalt shaking terrible showers onto poor Juliet,
dark colossi swung over relief maps of Gallipoli,
some veiny and ridged, some rushed as signatures.
As if we sprayed our own marks across the world,
blue tears of spunk upon black-and-white empires.
Not like the shower-room, where we held towels
in puppet shows over our small clusters of berries,
scuttling into the scalding water like guineafowl.
Even Big Gerry, who we all knew swung the strap
of a full-grown man, would cave in round himself
if Mr Gallagher scraped his boots on the doorstop.
That the idiot compulsion knows no boundaries is borne out in Irish poet Eoghan Walls' deliciously concise series of tercets: accumulating a battery of formal figures and devices - sibilance, assonance, half-rhyme and a rhythm that gently ebbs and flows - the poet successfully mimics the slow and pendulous swing of a giant Silenian phallus.
The bored kid who spans the class's geographical frontiers with his own inelegant defacements does so with a testosterone-fuelled hubris - 'blue tears of spunk upon black-and-white empires' - that is comically undercut by his dearth of experience in the art of sexual conquest.
Walls' final verses complete the counterpoint, as the boys, armed only with 'small clusters' of testicular berries, are reduced to an ignominious scuttle 'into the scalding water like guineafowl.'
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