I sit on the patio.
The Budapest Bake Shop welcomes me,
where summer lingers
in old brick walls,
and curious strangers stroll by
with lives I will never know,
while somewhere past the rooftops
the river keeps its one long sentence,
never finished, never still.
And somehow,
in this little café,
you are here.
Not in the chair beside me,
not across the table,
but somewhere between
the sunlight and my coffee,
between a song I remember
and a face the years could not erase—
the way the mist over the falls
is neither water nor air,
but both, and neither, and always.
I first heard of you
before I ever saw you—
a name in an article written by a cruel man,
a girl, an actress, called ugly
before she had even become a woman.
I wanted to know
why the world was so unkind to you.
Then came your long jet black mane,
your hand brushing it back,
and suddenly
the girl they had dismissed
was the most beautiful woman
I had ever seen—
beauty like the falls themselves,
ignored by the ones who live beside it,
undeniable to everyone who travels far to see it.
I was young.
You were impossibly far away.
So I wrote letters
across an ocean,
the way this river carries everything downstream
and asks nothing back.
They never reached you.
Years passed.
The world moved on,
the way water moves on,
the same falls, never the same water twice.
And then, somehow,
you found me.
You once told me
you were nothing.
I wish I could return
to that moment
and place this entire world
before you—
every photograph,
every forgotten film,
every person who now stops
to look at your face
the way they stop here,
at the rail, in the spray,
just to say: I saw it.
Not to tell you
that you were a star.
Only this:
You were seen.
And this summer evening,
on Queen Street,
your image reflects the sun
from my phone,
while Niagara breathes behind me—
that same unbroken roar
that has said the same thing
for ten thousand years,
and somehow still sounds new.
I raise my coffee
to you—
you who disappeared
from the world’s attention
but never disappeared
from mine,
no more than the falls disappear
when the tourists go home
and the lights go dark
and it keeps falling anyway.
Perhaps I spent forty years
trying to keep your memory alive,
only to discover
you were the one
who kept something alive in me—
the way the river doesn’t remember the rain
that first filled it,
and rushes on regardless,
carrying it still.
Source: The author, 2026.
This poem won First Place in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. It will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.
Azaghen Ramasamy is a Mauritian-born Canadian poet and writer based in Ontario. His work explores memory, distance, beauty, and the complicated ways in which people and places remain with us long after time has moved on. His poetry often brings the past into conversation with the present, using landscapes and ordinary moments as doorways into personal memory. A lifelong student of history and human stories, he is particularly drawn to lives that have been misunderstood, overlooked, or forgotten. He writes in both English and French.