Category: Niagara Falls Poems

On the American Side by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

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American, United Nations, and Canadian Flags on the Rainbow Bridge (Marking the International Border) with Niagara Falls in the Background. Photo by George Bailey. Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

On the other side of the Falls
There is a country expanding.
Highways and cities growing south.
Outlet malls with good deals. Postcards
That burrow scenic streetscapes in memory’s summers.
Cities where catalpa trees blossom and tourists
In June, with their phone cameras capture yet another pic
With the Niagara River crashing into rocks and mist.
With their wild pink rose and orange blossom shirts
They speed star spangled in the wind on freeways
Red white and blue confederate flags waving back
A solemn salute to history, to our red and white maple leaf
Emblem too, while on the other side she remains, America!
Her name still burning
With the idealisms of democracy
Solid underpinning to some newly built wall
Red flag of something terribly gone wrong,
Hopefully soon, blowing away like smoke in the air.
When I saw her yesterday she was still there, Lady Liberty
Holding out a torch to the Atlantic.
Instead today we lower our heads to watch the sightseers
Wearing yellow raincoats in the rapids of Lady of the Mist.
What can we do there that we couldn’t do on this side of the map?
On the border bridge we stand, unaware of political entanglements.
We want to keep her flame burning.
We are poets looking at her
Like a lover looking at her.
She is the land before the cartographers
Dissected her with historical demarcations
From Canada to Mexico.
We take photos of the beauty
Of America, north and south.
We salute her.
The freedom in her.
Lady luck in New York Harbour
Beyond regressive fascisms.
With a torch of freedom forever burning.
Burning in our memories, etched in our century.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews is a poet and the host & coordinator of the Oakville Literary Cafe Series. Her new collection, Sunrise Over Lake Ontario, was published in 2019. Her previous poetry publications include: Sea Glass, The Whispers of Stones, The Red Accordion, Letters from the Singularity and A Jar of Fireflies. Josie’s poetry has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, Descant’s Winston Collins Prize and The Canada Literary Review ’s Summer Poetry Competition, The Eden Mills Festival Literary Contest and the Henry Drummond Poetry Prize. Di Sciascio-Andrews’ poetry has won first place in Arborealis Anthology Contest and in Big Pond Rumours Literary E-Zine.

Visit Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews’ web page

Into the Mist by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

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Cover of Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews’ book “Sunrise Over Lake Ontario”

I remember hearing it before seeing it.
Feeling in the heart its’ cosmic hum.
Pulse of blood rushing to the temples.
Heavy rollercoastering roar of current.
Its’ turquoise jade body inescapably ceding
to gravity’s ominous pull.
It was that high tide inside oneself. Immensity’s
Perpetual aortic leap into the drop of the abyss.
As I look at the erasures of us in those faded
Polaroids & Kodaks, I only now realize that we
Too, amidst those endless crowds of tourists,
Were no more than drops of water falling.
H2O particles. Spritz from life’s colossal flow.
River of consciousness eternally brimming,
Cascading over the escarpment or the universe.
Niagara Falls was our refuge from tedium.
So many times we drove down from boring,
Sweltering Sundays for a change in atmosphere.
How wondrous when visitors came from overseas
Yearning to see the Honeymoon Capital of the World.
We gladly drove them down through the highways
To wine country, Clifton Hill & Lundy’s Lane.
We sat and picnicked on the grass
Where multitudes had stood before.
They say the sun was out when Annie Edson
Survived her barrell trip over God’s water slide.
They say her agents had wolfish eyes.
Just tried to make a buck out of her skill.
But they too are gone. Now they sell postcards
Of her story and her name’s in all the gift shops.
The world’s sightseers are all here taking photos
& buying souvenirs. Soon they will drive off
To be replaced tomorrow and tomorrow
After that by new faces in search of wonder,
Each one repeating, sparkling, falling
On the arched green of time’s precipice
Invisible life force calling all of our names.
Oh mighty river, my heart is in your hands.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews is a poet and the host & coordinator of the Oakville Literary Cafe Series. Her new collection, Sunrise Over Lake Ontario, was published in 2019. Her previous poetry publications include: Sea Glass, The Whispers of Stones, The Red Accordion, Letters from the Singularity and A Jar of Fireflies. Josie’s poetry has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, Descant’s Winston Collins Prize and The Canada Literary Review ’s Summer Poetry Competition, The Eden Mills Festival Literary Contest and the Henry Drummond Poetry Prize. Her poetry has won first place in Arborealis Anthology Contest and in Big Pond Rumours Literary E-Zine.

Visit Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews’ web page

Sunday Afternoon in Niagara Falls by Marilyn K. Moody

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It’s a grey february day, and we’re
just hanging out in old Niagara Falls,

in a bar next to the river, you know, you
can look out the smoke-smeared window,

and see the river across River Road, but
everyone there has seen that water all their

life, they don’t give a shit about the river or
the falls; maybe you might get a grunt or

something if you talked about Love Canal,
mainly cause everyone knows somebody

whose property values got ruined, and my
friend still points out that gash on the earth

every time we drive here to this sleazy but
not a biker bar here in her home town,

but the real purpose of coming here is
perfectly clear to us and everyone else.

We shoot pool.

The regulars at this bar know

their real purpose too, and they get to their
drinking and don’t even move, so we don’t ever

have to fight to put quarters in the table’s slot,
but we stack up the quarters for at least 10

games anyways, and then we chalk the cues
and then we rack the balls, and then WHOOSH

we break the balls, and you ain’t seen nothing
until you’ve seen the four of us playing pool

in a niagara falls bar in the middle of winter
with the whole bar wishing they were us,

and any guy who challenges our best
wishes he’d left the old bitches alone,

and we’re the main entertainment, we’re
the whole sunday afternoon show,

and we don’t ever let anybody down.

©1997 by Marilyn Moody

This Moment by Patrick T. Reardon

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Patrick T. Reardon at Niagara Falls

In lowering dark,
we drive the empty Canada streets,
Cathy and the kids and I,
looking for Niagara Falls.

We breathe in and out
together
as we round the next turn.

Source: Silver Birch Press, My Perfect Vacation Series, July 25, 2015. Click here to view the poem by Reardon on the Silver Birch Press website

Click here to visit Reardon’s website

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPH: In the background, that’s Niagara Falls which Cathy, the kids and I did find. This was in July 2000, and it was at a lookout, I’m pretty sure, on the Canadian side.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I had a hard time thinking about a “perfect” vacation. Perhaps I’m too Catholic; nothing ever seems perfect. This image/memory rose up amid my confusion. It was, maybe, a perfect moment.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Patrick T. Reardon was 11 years old when he had his first essay published in a neighborhood paper in Chicago, and, over the next half century or so, he has been writing news articles, feature stories, essays, book reviews and poems, often for money. He has published five books and is midway through the writing of a sixth.

Untitled by Le Sievr de la Franchise. Tr. by Jonathan Kaplansky

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Portrait of Jonathan Kaplansky, translator of this poem

Muses, if praises you sing, I recommend that you
Extol Champlain for his courage:
Not fearing danger, he has seen so many places
His reports are pleasing to our ears.
He has seen Peru, Mexico and the wonder
Of the infernal Vulcan that spews so much fire;
And the falls of Mocosa, that offend the eye
Of those who dare to see their unequalled cascade.
He promises us to venture further still,
Convert the heathens and find the Levant.
Heading North or South to go to China.
Charitably ‘tis all for the love of God.
Bah! Cowards who never move from one place to another!
Their lives, honestly, strike me as narrow.

Translated January 2021 by Jonathan Kaplansky

Click here to see the poem in its original French language form.

Source of original poem: Dow, Charles Mason. Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls ,  Albany: State of New York, 1921

Originally published: Champlain, Samuel de.  Des sauvages ou Voyage de Samuel Champlain De Brouage, fait en la France Nouvelle l’an mil six cens trois, 1604

From Dow: “It is an interesting fact that the first book printed in Europe which contains a reference to Niagara Falls, should also contain this sonnet in which allusion is made to the Falls. The sonnet follows the dedication. The old spelling of the original is followed in the quotation. Research has not revealed any information regarding the author.”  vol, 2, p693

From the 1899 book Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier by Frank Hayward Severance (p. 276-277): “The poetry of Niagara Falls is contemporary with the first knowledge of the cataract among civilized men. One may make this statement with positiveness, inasmuch as the first book printed in Europe which mentions Niagara Falls contains a poem in which allusion is made to that wonder … It seems proper, in quoting this first of all Niagara poems, to follow as closely as may be in modern type the archaic spelling of the original … I regret that some further research has failed to discover any further information regarding the poet De La Franchise. Obviously, he took rather more than the permissible measure of poet’s licence in saying that Champlain had seen Peru, a country far beyond the known range of Champlain’s travels. But in the phrase “les saults Mocosans,” the falls of Mocosa, we have the ancient name of the undefined territory afterwards labeled “Virginia.” The intent of the allusion is made plainer by Marc Lescarbot, who in 1610 wrote a poem in which he speaks of “great falls which the Indians say they encounter in ascending the St. Lawrence as far as the neighbourhood of Virginia.” The allusion can only be to Niagara.”

Jonathan Kaplansky works as a literary translator of French in Montreal. He won a
French Voices Award to translate Annie Ernaux’s Things Seen (La vie extérieure), and
recently translated a book by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec: The Cry of Vertières: Liberation,
Memory, and the Beginning of Haiti.
https://www.attlc-ltac.org/en/translator/jonathan-kaplansky-en/