Dirty Blue Danube

Dirty Blue Danube
by Peter Saunders

River Beatrice twists at its hawser on swollen, flooded river, peril apparent,

marooned in muddy anger racing from Passau to Black Sea,

between damning Roman bridges – thirty foot crest still two days away,

boat bruised and battered by debris and dead pigs.

Protected for the moment behind thermopane armor, appetite lost for

gourmet foie gras and Chilean bass while gulping bull’s blood

from Budapest’s thousand-year old torture cellars whose victims starved

on weevil-laced swill, the abyss between our selfish opulence and

holocaust horror not lost on us in our present inundating dilemma  – drowning

in dirty Danube as bad as garroting by Nazi. So we dessert

on Slovak singers’ terror tales of Stalin’s famine of millions, while viewing

Grand Palace of a millennium of dead tyrants

across our moat. Dutch captain attempts all possible courses before yielding

to passenger anxiety, generously declaring, in the name of host

Uniworld, The entire trip is free, to our raucous accolades. We abandon

ship for a velvet seven-hour rail trail to Prague,

spending a week with saint Vaclav Havel extolled in his Cathedral with a last

play that merited Russian prison. Mesmerized by Mozart’s Marriage

of Figaro, moved by Czech national anthem abhorring war in a city nearly

bombed, worst of times forgotten, Beatrice river ship safe at anchor.