The Demise of Howie Fell by T. W. Kriner

howie
Image by T. W. Kriner, ©2025

Howie drove to Niagara Falls.
Girlfriend wouldn’t take his calls.
Learned by text he’d just been dumped.
Walked to Prospect Point and jumped.

Source: T. W. Kriner Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours:
Rhymes of a Cranky Old Conservative. J & J Publishing ©2025
Available at Amazon.com

T. W. Kriner is the author of Journeys to the Brink of Doom (1997), In the Mad Water (1999), Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours (2025), and The Call of Tawiskaro (2025).  He lives in a Western New York swamp with his wife and two cats.

Kriner says:
About three years ago I began writing what I call four-by-four poems:   four lines with four beats per line, usually with a pair of rhyming couplets.  The challenge for me was to do at least one or more of the following in each poem:  tell a story;  paint a picture;  evoke or share a memory;  express a political opinion;  convey my view on a particular subject;  do something else while trying to get a laugh.   I’ve recently posted a fair number of them at  All Poetry .com, if you’d care to sample. 

The Battle of Cook’s Mills and the Evacuation of Canada, 19 Oct., 1814 by J. P. Merritt

mills
Battle of Cook’s Mills Memorial Peace Garden
Photo by Lucille Coleman
Military Memorials in Canada

Brown had come over to fight and annoy us,
Izard succeeded to blow up and destroy us,
Bold Drummond was posted on Welland’s steep banks,
Where he kept his brave soldiers close in their ranks.

Izard roamed up and down for a chance to pass over,
Not a bridge, not a ford, could he discover,
Not a raft, not a boat, not e’en a canoe,
Said he to his men “this business won’t do.”

Unless we can swim, like the Niagara ducks,
We cannot get over to strike these Canucks,
Besides we have eaten along this great river—
All the provisions here stored, so its “stand and deliver.”

Says Bissel, “we’ll march, if us you will send,—
With riflemen, Dragoons, the spoil we will rend.”
So his band it roamed round, and took at their will,
All in the back country, but the flour in Cooks Mill.

On the nineteenth October, they arrived at the place,
Where the undaunted Glengaries [sic – Glengarries] they met face to face,
The single Canuck two Yanks had to meet ;
No disgrace, after fighting, they beat a retreat.

Fighting, not plunder, Yanks hands did employ,
So they thought it the best, Cook’s Mills to destroy.
To head-quarters they march with diminished ranks,
Sans plunder, sans glory, with very small thanks.

A few days more the enemy linger,
But of our provisions they touch not a finger,
November the fifth, ʼmid explosion of bastions,
They ferry across, and eat their full rations.

Source:  William Kirby Fonds, Archives of Ontario, MU1652, box 18, item G-56:
“The Battle of Cook’s Mills and the Evacuation of Canada, 19 October 1814”. A patriotic poem by “J.P.M.” [J. P. Merritt].

Read about the Battle of Cook’s Mills

 

Niagara by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

reynolds
HorseshoeFalls and Upper NiagaraRiver from the Canadian Side. Photo by Joanne De Simone Reynolds, 2019

The mist   The falls   The split
Every body giddy for it   Every body
Transfixed   Joyous noise   The weir-dam sheer
Power of it   Volume
Churned up   Every body electrified   Every body
Eclipsed   The spray haloing every head   Rainbows
Multiplying like the fishes   Water
Fired up   Every one speaking in tongues   Every one
Bewitched   Paradox   Of biblical proportion   Where
Thunder Beings once existed   Ecstasy
In every femtosecond   In every drop:
Resurrection   Fishes falling through the falls cushioned
By froth   Soft immaculate breast of the goddess   Plunging
The escarpment   Sacred once   Once sublime   Siphoned to spectacle

Source: The Author, April 2025

Bio:
Joanne De Simone Reynolds was poetry judge for Art on the Trails in Southborough, Massachusetts in 2023 after placing first for poetry in 2022. Her collection of sixteen ekphrastic poems for 2020 Art Ramble in Concord, Massachusetts can be viewed alongside images of the sculptures at The Umbrella arts center.

Joanne De Simone Reynolds visited Niagara Falls in August of 2019.

The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh

singh
Part of the Canadian Falls and the American Falls seen through the mist
Photo by Andrew Porteus

When I first saw it
I was wonderstruck.
Yes, what a wonder—
wonder on earth.

When I saw the Niagara Falls again
I was wonderstruck, true,
but pensive—
where does it flow from
where does it go
how much
how big
how long shall it last—
and a thousand questions
which have no answer.

When I saw it again and again
I was prayer itself.
No questions
nor answers
a sense of just being nought
a zero—
like man
in His creation.

Today I see you
my friend
like Niagara Falls
as I saw it last.
Words, wonders,
thoughts, ideas,
earthly profundity
godly truths
godly secrets
flow out of your mind
your lips!

Vast expanses
countless Milky Ways
universe after universe
shapes itself and vanishes—
you, dear friend,
are the Niagara Falls.

Source:  Dubey, Bijay Kant.  The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh. ResearchGate, January 2024.

First published in Singh’s Crossroads.

Read Dubey’s essay about The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh.

 

 

Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha

I was driving, you took over the stereo. That Lucinda song
I’d never heard. Lodestar too. We ate bad pizza.
You beat me at Skee-ball. We must have looked at the falls—
I remember how nervous you were at the blackjack table.
How I learned you are afraid of heights, handsome
in any T-shirt. How I dared you to charm the girl
at the prize counter, just so I could watch you—
I held your hand,  wanted to take your arm.
 
It’s almost impossible to imagine you then,
in that tacky motel,
not yet my partner, no longer my friend, so newly
my lover. The roar of the water— even when you don’t hear it,
it pours and pours, erasing the rock underneath.
nolan
Nolan Natasha and the cover of their book
I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?


Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha was published in their book I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me (Invisible Publishing, 2019) and the performed version is the second episode of I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?  YouTube channel. On this channel Nolan creates videos inspired by poems and short narratives.

 

From their website:

I am a queer and trans writer, performer, and filmmaker. 

Of Faroese and English ancestry, I am a settler living on unceded Mi’Kmaw territory in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. I have been a finalist for the CBC poetry prize, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry prize, the Geist postcard contest, and was the runner-up for the Thomas Morton fiction prize. My debut poetry collection, I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? was released in the fall of 2019 with Invisible Publishing. I am currently working on a collection of short stories and a series of video poems.