Category: Biographical Poems

Emily Helena Crummer Lodge by Anonymous

lodge
Emily Helena Crummer Lodge, 1828-1864.
Image courtesy of Michelle Ann Kratts

Her grave with spreading briar is grown,
And most the name o’er wends,
Upon the shattered fallen stone,
That tells of home and friends;

Are British hearts, so hard and cold,
And dead to Love’s bequest,
That Valor’s child forgotten sleeps,
In Stangers’ Rest?

O roll, Niagara’s mighty wave,
Sing to her in her dreams,
With tears of spray bedew her grave,
And sunlight flood with beams,

O birds at morn sing sweetly there,
Beside your happy rest,
And stars of night look kindly down,
In Strangers’ Rest.

Source:  Kratts, Michelle Ann. The Missed: Tales of Spirit & Tragic End at Niagara Falls.  2013.  Originally published in the Niagara Falls Gazette, August 1891.

The inscription states that Lodge “died many years ago at the Cataract House” hotel. Records indicate that she died in October 1864. For information about Lodge see chapter 2 of the Death Sketches section of The Missed by Michelle Ann Kratts

Lodge is buried in the Strangers’ Rest (also known as Travelers’ Rest) section of the Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, NY. See the grave record of Emily Helena Crummer Lodge

Home to Niagara by Deborah Ranchuk

ranchuk
Satellite View of the North-East Section of the Niagara Peninsula, Niagara Falls Center Left, Escarpment Running East to West, Parallel to the Lake Ontario Shoreline
Courtesy of Canada Topo Maps

Crazy creeks break up grid patterns
Man has tried to impose.
Rattlesnake bogs, winding rivers,
Thundering world famous cataracts:
Water everywhere,
Natural courses and huge man-made ditches.
Roller coaster effects courtesy of the escarpment
Excite otherwise boring, like everywhere else, roads.
Weather splits there between Lincoln North and South
Cradling one, blasting the other in turn.

Home is the place you leave
But won’t leave you,
Having deftly intertwined your soul and mind.
From everywhere I’ve ever been
I can close my eyes and be in Niagara.

Source:  Deborah Ranchuk published “Home to Niagara:” in  Captured Essence: Niagara Poetry Anthology, vol. 11. St. Catharines: Canadian Authors Association, Niagara Branch, 1995

With thanks to Arden Phair who pointed out this poem by Deborah Ranchuk to the Niagara Falls Poetry Project curator.

Epiphanies on the First Cold Day by Robert Billings

billings
The cover of Before the Heart Went Down by Robert Billings

1
I thought there was nothing in the fields of light
that was not there in darkness

After breakfast in a quiet house
surrounded by pastures of new frost
my heart crouches believing
the next sound will be
something it can sing

2
This is my persistent nightmare

I jump into a shallow river
My feet sink in mud
to mid-calf, the top
of my head
just breaks the surface

It’s November:
too soon for ice
to preserve me

At noon I warm my hands at the apples
ripening on a window sill

3
The smell of cold through an open window

On the corner of my desk
is a print of a mother-goddess
in a black plastic frame:

Syria
Third century B.C.

The guide-book defines
Civilization
means living together

Sometimes a glancing blow
is the back of my wife’s hand
slowly down my thigh

4
And so it comes back to this

In Munich 1974
a man in a bar
said a cormorant
dropping from a cliff
is the soul of
whatever flung this
earth on the sea

Midnight on the highway through Perth County
wearing sunglasses against the headlights
I bite through the cold skin of an apple

Source: Waves vol 11, no 2 & 3, Winter 1983

Robert Billings, born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and raised Fort Erie, became well known in Canadian literary circles as a poet, critic, teacher,  and editor of Poetry Canada Review and Poetry Toronto.  In 1983 he penned the poem “Epiphanies of the First Cold Day.” Epiphany 2 foreshadowed his eventual fate. In 1986 after his marriage broke down and bouts of depression hit him, he threw himself into the Niagara River. His body was not recovered until six months later.

Fellow poet and editor Herb Barrett paid tribute to Billings in his poem For Robert Billings

Watch the video At the Brink: A Personal Look at Suicides Over Niagara Falls by Michael Clarkson. Clarkson was a long-time friend of Robert Billings, who is one of the people discussed in the video.

For Robert Billings by Herb Barrett

barrett
The Niagara Gorge, c1900.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

 

FOR ROBERT BILLINGS
whose body was recovered
from the Niagara Gorge

Some things leave us speechless
‡‡‡‡‡fear of the unknown
‡‡‡‡‡confronting death
‡‡‡‡‡falling in & out of love
‡‡‡‡‡trouble so acute
‡‡‡‡‡we feel strapped
‡‡‡‡‡in a strait jacket
‡‡‡‡‡abandoned
‡‡‡‡‡with no road back
‡‡‡‡‡no forward
‡‡‡‡‡mute as a sacrifice
‡‡‡‡‡waiting to be rendered

‡‡‡‡‡here
‡‡‡‡‡was beauty created
‡‡‡‡‡poems spun
‡‡‡‡‡like tapestries
‡‡‡‡‡to enhance
‡‡‡‡‡the bleak corners
‡‡‡‡‡of existence

‡‡‡‡‡underneath
‡‡‡‡‡some dark corrosive
‡‡‡‡‡ate at the spirit
‡‡‡‡‡the eclectic rocket
‡‡‡‡‡somewhere misfired

‡‡‡‡‡who can judge
‡‡‡‡‡the why
‡‡‡‡‡the day
‡‡‡‡‡desolate as famine
‡‡‡‡‡that drove you
‡‡‡‡‡to the brink
‡‡‡‡‡lonely as a last moment
‡‡‡‡‡your body engulfed
‡‡‡‡‡by roaring mist…

‡‡‡‡‡the cruel rocks
‡‡‡‡‡keep their secret
‡‡‡‡‡where a cry ends
‡‡‡‡‡and silence begins

Source:  Canadian Author & Bookman, Vol. 63, no.3, Spring 1988

Robert Billings, a Niagara Falls, Ontario, native, became well known in Canadian literary circles as a poet, critic, teacher,  and editor of Poetry Canada Review and Poetry Toronto.  In 1983 he penned the poem “Epiphanies of the First Cold Day.”  Epiphany 2 reads in part:

This is my persistent nightmare:
I jump into a shallow river
My feet sink in mud to mid-calf, the top of my head just breaks the surface
It’s November
Too soon for the ice to preserve me.

In Waves, vol. 11, issue 2/3, winter 1983

In 1986 after his marriage broke down and bouts of depression hit him, he threw himself into the Niagara River. His body was not recovered until six months later.

Read “Epiphanies of the First Cold Day” here

Herb Barrett (c1912-1995) was a poet who first published in the Hamilton Spectator in the 1930s, helped found the Canadian Poetry Association, and was a long-time poetry magazine editor.  The Haiku Foundation named The Herb Barrett Award after him.

Ferrotype by Karen Drayne

drayne
An Unknown Lady.
A typical studio portrait using a backdrop of a view of Niagara Falls.
Image Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

My great-grandparents are both twenty-one.
This is their honeymoon.  They sit in front
of a pasteboard screen of Niagara Falls
painted in aniline blues and greens.

Unnecessary props—plaster columns, draperies
and wax flowers—have been pushed aside.
He leans his elbow on the false balustrade,
restless in his dark suit, one leg extended,

One hand hidden behind her back.
Both of them frown at the camera.
He has not even taken off his hat
to balance it on his knee. Perhaps

he is already thinking of leaving.
Inverted in the viewing glass her white dress
wavers in and out of focus. The photographer
bends above his box and pleated bellows,

a black cloth over his head.
He tends the image carefully, as if
it is a lantern he is trying to keep
alight. This far north the sun sets early.

Beyond the glass wall of the studio
it is already night. The photographer lifts
his hand to bid them to be still. He lights
the touch paper. The shutter clicks.

Magnesium flashes with the power of
twelve hundred candles. As the column
of white smoke settles, the room fills
with a fine metallic powder. Their faces are

both silvered over. This is the only photograph
of them together. They do not move or speak.
Outside each second nine thousand tons of water
fall through the full dark of the last century.

Source:  The New Republic, vol 218, issue 13, March 30, 1998