Sarah Stutt, winner of the East Riding Poetry Prize 2010 and 2012, took her Creative Writing MA from the University of Hull in 2010.

River Humber

Muck tub, mud bath, death pool,
I am a murderer, not just some
flat expanse of ugly magnificence.
Drainage basin, treacherous, dirty,
of dismal, infinite girth,
yes, I am full of riverine silt and earth,
with a disturbingly morbid thirst
for sinking every uninvited guest.

I am wicked, deep and turbid,
37 miles wide at my mouth,
where an uncouth fang, a spindly
peninsula of sand and shingle, hooks
like a breakwater, near to Kilnsea.
She listens with her concrete ear,
but hears nothing of my breakneck velocity,
or my deep-belly hunger growl.

I feed from a fifth of England’s waters
but it can never be enough,
I need the muffled terror and slaughter
of life’s reckless deserters, who
jump, arms flailing, from the bridge.
I am a shape-shifter, full of moving
sediment, forming semi-permanent
mud-banks along my tidal edges.

I look the picture of respectability,
with my power stations and oil refineries
at Grimsby and Immingham,
as grim and unmemorable
as their names suggest, but I do my
carnivorous best, despite being so fast
and long, you can hardly take a breath,
and so brown, flat and wide,
I am the horizon, an anonymous,
little-known, muddy source of pride
for anyone who admires my deadpan
wit and single-span smile.