From your deep bed’s lavish side
Transfixed I watch your body glide
Its power and its beauty grow
Your curves and your exquisite flow
Carve your name across great lands
As they have done since time began
How you entrance and twist and dance
East towards an azure Black Sea
Inciting and inviting me
To caress you with my fingertips
Taste your salt upon my lips
To dip my toes but nothing more
Enchantingly you draw and claw
Me blindly in towards your shore
Tempt me to your watery depths
Steal my last and final breath
A love to lead me to my death
You mesmerise, I’m mystified
You tantalise, I fantasise
I close my eyes, avert my gaze
Not fooled by your seductive waves
Today I am your chosen one
But I shall turn and soon be gone
Not joining all the countless slaves
You led spellbound into their graves
Tranquil, soothing and deep blue
Your waters whisper and subdue
Changing hue without warning
Currents swirling and transforming
Suddenly violent, wild and cruel
Steal from so many ships of fools
Lives dashed into your deadly pools
Handing out in equal measure
Great destruction, extremes of pleasure
A murderess with a heart of stone
No body you can call your own
So from mortals you take flesh and bone
From fishermen, sailors and from traders
Pirates, assassins and invaders
Of the shores that you have kissed
Those perished souls doomed to exist
With wisp, with worm and basilisk
Til spewed from your gut obscenely engorged
Into dark and ancient channels forged
By Sulina, Kilia and St George
Lugged then plunged to the briny’s floor
To lie near Achilles from the Trojan War
By his Isle of Serpents forevermore
An old green wooden fisherman's hut beside the River Danube (known locally as the Dunav / Дунав) near the town of Svishtov in Bulgaria, approximately 80 kms from where I live. I love watching rivers flow by but the might of the Dunav (the second longest in Europe, after the Don) is extraordinary. Its beauty and the folklore and mythology that accompany it compelled me to write this poem.