This River Accepts Offerings

This River Accepts Offerings

written by: Michael Ball

@whirred

Mighty and powerful and cruel rivers,
The Colorado or Rio Grande,
Crush and swallow hikers, swimmers, rafters
And then simply churn and roil along.

Not so the 400-mile, mild Potomac.
Gnarled like the Charles in Massachusetts,
It graciously takes what we provide.
A few of us insist on drowning there.

Ululating siren can mean fire, wreck
Or drowning — surely in that Potomac.
Small-town voyeurs hie to the fire station
To the county chalkboard of tragedy.

Bodies, yes, and booze bottles tossed before
Parents can survey their good children’s cars.
And broken Fords disappear off the bridge.
The river took it all, takes it all still.

The omnivorous, hungry Potomac.
It remains the polite Southern cousin
Of mighty and mean waters in canyons
And younger, ragged, and wilder mountains.

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Michael Ball

Michael Ball scrambled from daily and weekly papers through business and technical pubs. Satisfaction and feeling like a writer came through blogging and podcasting, mostly political. Born in OK and raised in rural WV, he became more citified in Manhattan and Boston. He joined the Hyde Park Poets Workshop two years ago, and will never again write a manual or help system. He has moderate success placing poems in print and online.

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