Poetry of and about Niagara Falls & the Niagara River – the waterfalls, the city, the history, the stunters, and everything else Niagara
Author: Andrew Porteus
Andrew Porteus is a retired librarian who started the Niagara Falls Poetry Project in 1998 in order to gather in one place the hundreds of poems that exist about Niagara Falls. Andrew returned to Brock University to get a Master of Art degree based on the website
Strands of darkening
tangerine twilight
tantalizes
an Ontario skyline
near Horseshoe Falls
sending frothy waves,
sheets of water
cascading over
rocky outcroppings
into the Niagara River,
as we stand
on the observation deck
at Skylon Tower
mesmerized
by its sheer force
hours before
moonlight casts
its glow on a dark
June evening sky,
before we whisper
under the stars.
A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and Nameless Roads (2019) – copies available from opmewriter@gmail.com. His poems have appeared in the Aurorean (US), Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses (Wales), Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Strand (India), The Madrigal (Ireland), The Wild Word (Germany) and Voices of the Poppies (United Kingdom).He holds the rank of full professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI.
The first time it happened was on a family holiday when the parents piled the four of us into the back seat of our wood-panelled Plymouth station wagon, circa 1959.
Dan 10
moi 9
Deb 5
Dave 4
I hear ya, the 4 Ds, what were they thinking?
We piled in, we were piled on, we were on a camping trip from Ottawa to see the falls, the mythical falls!
A long day journey with moi pleading car sickness so I could sit up front and not stay squished in the back with the squabblers. I know, you’re wondering how can 4 kids be packed into the back seat of a station wagon: no problem: this trip was 20 years prior to that belt legislation. Plus, we had Heidi with us, a usually sweet dachshund, but cranky car companion. What were they thinking?
Am writing this in the throes of slouching towards 75, can’t remember anything much about the actual road trip. But we must’ve played horses and cemeteries. You get points for horses you see in the fields and you lose all your points if someone yells ‘cemetery’. This requires lots of I saw it first.
But I do remember the awestruckness of seeing the falls, feeling the mist, the magnetism of the cataract, the thunderous roar, the trembling…and the irresistible desire, more the irresistible need, to leap. To be one with the shoots, the flumes, the brume….
Even today, with small cascades, like Hogsback Falls on the Rideau River in Ottawa, I want to leap.
Anyone out there feel the same tug?
Perhaps Annie Edson Taylor did when she first saw Niagara Falls. To design and build a barrel, at age 63, and throw herself into the river and over the falls! We’re talking a drop of 160 feet, a flow rate of 85,000 cubic feet per second! Though she was the first person to survive this remarkable feat, she was not the risk taker you might take her for: she sent her cat over the precipice a few days earlier, and he survived.
You? Would you go over Niagara Falls for fame and fortune?
Donna-Lee Smith writes mostly from Montreal, but also from an off-the-grid cabin in the Laurentian hills north of the city, where bears raid the blueberries and wolves commune with the moon. At other times she writes from Gotland Island (Baltic Sea) where her grandchildren also eat blueberries and commune in Swedish.
Niagara is a revelation of the cosmos to each and every man.
— David C. Huntington
Sure, I’ll breathe poetry there. My mind will be an embouchure
through which your powerful waters pour thunder. I will hear
nothing else, not the sharp sound waves spearing my bellows,
nor honeymooners whose croons you swallow into white foam
and spew out as a shimmering arch of rainbow. You’ll teach me
about the cosmos by proving the paradox of water in motion:
that its motion is a stillness, that its stillness is ever in motion.
My body will be a speck of silence swallowed by your howling
emerald olivine chrysoberyl pale blue ice snowy pinnacles,
your ten-thousand-year-old ceaselessly cataracting avalanche,
your constant breath ever billowing through one diapason,
yet not one prism in your mist ever splits light the same way.
Like that bared jagged root snagged on your brink, I’d abide
inside your relentless remaking. Eyes on a digital or hands
on a canvas covered with smooth strokes would never equal
the whole of me, mind, body, heart and soul, all immersed
in the whole of your eloquence greater even than my whole
world, you patient shale-shaper, finale of the Niagara River,
you Ice Age’s fossil water, you rhapsody of ancient glaciers
ever burgeoning into new birth, you under whose arcades
lovers sport crowned with bright sprays, you whose sheer
impetus splashes the sun’s and moon’s incandescent faces,
I keep calling you Whirlpool, Horseshoe, Luna Falls, Iris Falls
and you chant to purple clouds a booming Gravity is Grace.
Lucie Chou is an ecopoet working in mainland China. Currently an undergraduate majoring in English language and literature, she is also interested in the ecotone between ekphrasis and ecopoetics, and in exploring the magic presences of other-than-human living beings bleeding into the lonely arrogance of human experience. Her work has appeared in the Entropy magazine, the Black Earth Institute Blog, the Tiny Seed Journal website, The Ekphrastic Review, Transom, and in the Plant Your Words Anthology published by Tiny Seed Press. A poem is forthcoming in from Tofu Ink Arts, both in print and online. She has published a debut collection of ecopoetry, Convivial Communiverse, with Atmosphere Press. She hikes, gardens, and studies works of natural history by Victorian writers with gusto. In August 2023, she participated in the Tupelo Press 30 / 30 project where she fundraised for the indie press by writing one poem each day for a month. She writes for a constellation of brilliant readers hopefully including street trees and feral animals she encounters in each city she travels to.
Niagara—some say the name is a bastardised form of the Iroquois “Onguiaahra.” They say it means “The Strait.” Now “Niagara” has become associated with a thunderous image. That I can feel.
I only ever imagined its deafening voice,
its power, its white foam, its cold spray,
imagined myself in a slicker with a hood–
preferably blue (or red)–
on a boat, getting nearer, nearer, nearer,
before we are being sucked into unimaginable
depths, Charybdis and Scylla,
my fellow passengers quiet
in the face of such a relentless force.
When I close my eyes
I see dark clouds pulling up,
attracted like magnets to a cauldron
of deep water, angry foam, killer rocks.
The door to Hades.
Who will pay the ferryman?
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a ‘Pushcart’ and once for ‘Best of Net’. DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS? (Kelsay Books July 2022), WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Cyberwit July 2022), and SAUDADE (December 2022) are available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon is a new collection, LIFE STUFF, published by Kelsay Books November 2023. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
The gallery lies in silence.
Clusters of faces pause
canvas to canvas
lips miming words,
the unheard musings of the many.
I inhale their movement,
jackets and backpacks jostle
the canvas to my right
the vertical drop of Niagara Falls
drawing us into its power.
The tide turns.
My eyes conjure sounds
only I can hear,
decibels of cyan and teal
the roar of acrylic licking the frame.
I taste the grit of salt on teeth,
sea-spray fresh on my face.
Violet tones colour my mood,
the distinctive tang of oil on wood.
I open my senses, hear it all.
Kate Young lives in England and enjoys writing poetry, painting and playing the guitar and ukulele. Her poems have appeared in various webzines, magazines, and Chapbooks. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness has been published by Hedgehog Press and her next pamphlet Beyond the School Gate is due to be published in May 2024. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet.
