Best Deathriver Poems
The river lazily ran through the lovely pasture scene.
Poets wrote their pretty poems about the river’s charms,
Carrying its living water, reflecting purest green
As lovers sat upon its banks, locked in each other's arms.
Way back in nineteen Eighty Two, idly pleasure boating,
He chanced on unexpected sight of homicidal death.
This man discovered horror beneath the surface floating,
So shocking to his senses that he almost lost his breath.
He’d discovered the first body of victims known to date
Of dread Green River killer, Gary Ridgeway is his name.
Sixteen years to catch him, the murders stand at forty-eight.
With waters tinged with red, the pretty river’s not the same.
Won no. 4 in contest
ICE FUNERAL
My River Smolenka has been free of ice now for weeks, but today
I saw the flat smoothly-flowing river steaming grey -
Bearing remnant ice-floes from some upper tributary stream,
Small, weak, lifeless, their former life a dream:
An ice funeral cortege - silent slow black calm steady
All floes going to die - each melts, reunited with its parent substance like souls unready.
Each drops its load of dirt and cigarette butts and beer bottles - purified.
Only by the stuff it has dropped is its shabby existence testified.
Smolenka is their Styx - their frozen wastes will never return;
Unmourned by watchers on the bridge, who turn
Aside like all the rest
In disinterest.