Category: Niagara Poet

The Local Tourist by Amanda Leonard

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Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip Arrive by Car at Niagara Falls, October 14, 1951. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

Niagara. She is my favourite painter.

Because I taste limestone on my eyes’ parched lips and swim with carelessness in her urgency in constant motion

Because she is felt on the back of dawn
And not popping within of free fireworks, as she holds a much deeper secret

Her body, decaying with duplicitous effigies of her story, a story of erosion, of two bodies of water, meeting

A story lost without capture, lost outside the frame

Dipping my toes in such honeymoon
Of past loves
More luxurious than any fiberglass tub dripping with scarlet passion
And more than his thick hands on the steel beams hoistening up more divide, parking meters

She is beneath me, underneath those man-made islands
And searchingly, meandering to lower ground,

And its because her sound reverberates on the other side of the world

She sits still, in her royally crescent moon as time flowing through her like silk, changes her

Until, high beams flash in my rearview mirror
Telling me to move along
I have been staring at her for far too long

Source: Amanda Leonard, 2020

Amanda Leonard is an English/Visual Arts teacher who enjoys writing and sketching. She was born and raised in Niagara Falls, but has been nomadic for the last decade.
She is currently writing a novel that is set in modern day Niagara Falls.

Niagara, My Home Town by Stephanie Vigh Nielsen

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Rendezvous Motel & Restaurant, 3611 Lundy’s Lane, Highway 3a & 20, Niagara Falls, Canada. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

In the town where I was born, we’d walk up Lundy’s Lane
And talk about the dreams we had.
Life was a glass of ginger ale and a juke box serenade,
And we never thought of growing old.
Yes, I know those days have come and gone
Still I think about my old home town.

At a place called the Rendezvous, we’d congregate at eight
And talk about the baseball game.
Lights flashing on the window pane, watching cars go up the lane,
We’d wait for friends and lovers.
Yes, I know those days have come and gone
Still I think about my old home town.

Lavender mist makes a foggy night haze
While the falls come crashing ahead.
And I lean on the rail feel the damp cooling spray
Watching the foam turn a luminous maze.

And as I drive towards the town, the neon signs flash on
And thoughts begin to fill my head.
Oh the happiness I found, in my family’s old home town
Where nothing seemed to ever change.
Life was very simple, way back then
And we thought that it would never end.

When our dreams of long ago were scattered on the way
And our childish hopes departed.
Life went on but not the same, we grew up, we’re not to blame,
And those magic times forgotten.
Life was very simple, way back then
And we thought that it would never end.

Source: Niagara Falls (Ontario). Coronation Centre Newsletter, 1974

©1974 by Stephanie Vigh Nielsen

Visit Stephanie Vigh Nielsen’s Niagara Proud website

Apple: Skin to the Core: A Memoir in Words and Pictures by Eric Gansworth

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Apple, a memoir in verse and pictures by Eric Gansworth is an important addition to the literature of Niagara. Gansworth,  who was raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in Niagara County, New York, just outside Niagara Falls, still resides in the area and teaches in Buffalo, NY.  The book has been longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award and is a Junior Library Guild selection.

Publisher supplied book information:

How about a book that makes you barge into your boss’s office to read a page of poetry from? That you dream of? That every movie, song, book, moment that follows continues to evoke in some way?

The term “Apple” is a slur in Native communities across the country. It’s for someone supposedly “red on the outside, white on the inside.”

Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple: Skin to the Core. The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.

Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

Run to your nearest library or book store to read this remarkable collection by Eric Gansworth.

Visit Eric Gansworth’s website

Niagara Poetry Guild

Are you a poet living in the Niagara area? There is a new group called the Niagara Poetry Guild for poets to get together, critique each other’s poetry, and talk poetry in general. They meet online using Meetup on the second & fourth Mondays of the month. Please feel free to contact them.

Here’s a link to their next meeting   https://www.meetup.com/Niagara-Poetry-Guild/events/272197888/ 

Here’s a link to their Facebook page (you have to ask to be added) https://www.facebook.com/groups/717559958789012/

Achilles in Time and Space by David Hobberlin

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Homer and His Guide (1874) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau


Ilium’s sword is overcome by Homer’s spear.
An epic verse that masks and masks again
the players in a drama cast in stone.
They come from out the mind to appear
as Grecian warriors reborn in the flesh;
who caught up in the battlement of war
suffer mortal wounds. Yet, as heroes dare
to gain the spoils that others can but wish.
I do not see the man whom Homer was
for he is too cloaked within the path of time.
The sharpened stylus moving with the rhyme
of atom touching atom only finds the fair Achilles;
not the hand that writes him on the stage,
not the mentor of this student of the page.

September 1995
Source: The author
I am a Canadian poet currently living in Chippawa. Over the years my poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and periodicals beginning with the anthology ‘Canadian Poets of 1969’.

The poem ‘On the Waterfront of Toronto’ earned the Monica Ladell Award 2012 for best poem presented by the Scarborough Arts Society.

I have participated in various poetry readings and venues held in Toronto, Scarborough, Welland, St. Catharines, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Niagara Falls.

Grey Borders Books published three chapbooks of my poetry – Inanna  (A Tale of Sumer),  Reflections on the Republic, and Going to Work on a Snowy Morning. Click to visit the David Hobberlin page on the Grey Borders Books website
The Indian Heritage Council of Morristown, Tennessee, published a limited edition chapbook ‘The Pipe Maker and Other Poems’ in the millennial year 2000.