Tag: Niagara Falls

The Demise of Howie Fell by T. W. Kriner

howie
Image by T. W. Kriner, ©2025

Howie drove to Niagara Falls.
Girlfriend wouldn’t take his calls.
Learned by text he’d just been dumped.
Walked to Prospect Point and jumped.

Source: T. W. Kriner Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours:
Rhymes of a Cranky Old Conservative. J & J Publishing ©2025
Available at Amazon.com

T. W. Kriner is the author of Journeys to the Brink of Doom (1997), In the Mad Water (1999), Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours (2025), and The Call of Tawiskaro (2025).  He lives in a Western New York swamp with his wife and two cats.

Kriner says:
About three years ago I began writing what I call four-by-four poems:   four lines with four beats per line, usually with a pair of rhyming couplets.  The challenge for me was to do at least one or more of the following in each poem:  tell a story;  paint a picture;  evoke or share a memory;  express a political opinion;  convey my view on a particular subject;  do something else while trying to get a laugh.   I’ve recently posted a fair number of them at  All Poetry .com, if you’d care to sample. 

Niagara by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

reynolds
HorseshoeFalls and Upper NiagaraRiver from the Canadian Side. Photo by Joanne De Simone Reynolds, 2019

The mist   The falls   The split
Every body giddy for it   Every body
Transfixed   Joyous noise   The weir-dam sheer
Power of it   Volume
Churned up   Every body electrified   Every body
Eclipsed   The spray haloing every head   Rainbows
Multiplying like the fishes   Water
Fired up   Every one speaking in tongues   Every one
Bewitched   Paradox   Of biblical proportion   Where
Thunder Beings once existed   Ecstasy
In every femtosecond   In every drop:
Resurrection   Fishes falling through the falls cushioned
By froth   Soft immaculate breast of the goddess   Plunging
The escarpment   Sacred once   Once sublime   Siphoned to spectacle

Source: The Author, April 2025

Bio:
Joanne De Simone Reynolds was poetry judge for Art on the Trails in Southborough, Massachusetts in 2023 after placing first for poetry in 2022. Her collection of sixteen ekphrastic poems for 2020 Art Ramble in Concord, Massachusetts can be viewed alongside images of the sculptures at The Umbrella arts center.

Joanne De Simone Reynolds visited Niagara Falls in August of 2019.

The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh

singh
Part of the Canadian Falls and the American Falls seen through the mist
Photo by Andrew Porteus

When I first saw it
I was wonderstruck.
Yes, what a wonder—
wonder on earth.

When I saw the Niagara Falls again
I was wonderstruck, true,
but pensive—
where does it flow from
where does it go
how much
how big
how long shall it last—
and a thousand questions
which have no answer.

When I saw it again and again
I was prayer itself.
No questions
nor answers
a sense of just being nought
a zero—
like man
in His creation.

Today I see you
my friend
like Niagara Falls
as I saw it last.
Words, wonders,
thoughts, ideas,
earthly profundity
godly truths
godly secrets
flow out of your mind
your lips!

Vast expanses
countless Milky Ways
universe after universe
shapes itself and vanishes—
you, dear friend,
are the Niagara Falls.

Source:  Dubey, Bijay Kant.  The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh. ResearchGate, January 2024.

First published in Singh’s Crossroads.

Read Dubey’s essay about The Niagara Falls by Narenderpal Singh.

 

 

Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha

I was driving, you took over the stereo. That Lucinda song
I’d never heard. Lodestar too. We ate bad pizza.
You beat me at Skee-ball. We must have looked at the falls—
I remember how nervous you were at the blackjack table.
How I learned you are afraid of heights, handsome
in any T-shirt. How I dared you to charm the girl
at the prize counter, just so I could watch you—
I held your hand,  wanted to take your arm.
 
It’s almost impossible to imagine you then,
in that tacky motel,
not yet my partner, no longer my friend, so newly
my lover. The roar of the water— even when you don’t hear it,
it pours and pours, erasing the rock underneath.
nolan
Nolan Natasha and the cover of their book
I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?


Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha was published in their book I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me (Invisible Publishing, 2019) and the performed version is the second episode of I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?  YouTube channel. On this channel Nolan creates videos inspired by poems and short narratives.

 

From their website:

I am a queer and trans writer, performer, and filmmaker. 

Of Faroese and English ancestry, I am a settler living on unceded Mi’Kmaw territory in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. I have been a finalist for the CBC poetry prize, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry prize, the Geist postcard contest, and was the runner-up for the Thomas Morton fiction prize. My debut poetry collection, I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? was released in the fall of 2019 with Invisible Publishing. I am currently working on a collection of short stories and a series of video poems.

 

Niagara by Timothy

timothy
Two ladies posing in front of a Niagara Falls backdrop, one with an umbrella. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

There’s nothing (saving six,) great blustering Fall,
Thou may’st not to the fancy’s sense recall,
A drove of bleating, wooly-coated sheep,
Each other chasing in a headlong leap ;
The flaunting flounces of a dancing rout :
A cask of whiskey with the head knocked out ;
A stormy fury, jealous of her spouse,
Smashing the total crockery of the house ;
The frothy bombast of some learned dunce ;
Ten thousand bawling children whipt at once ;
A city’s soap-suds on a washing  day,
Or rowdy hubbubs of a drunken fray ;
     The present times, so meatless—’ out of joint,’
Or breakfast cascades, off rough Judith’s point,

Oh may the spray that flusters o’er thy water,
Making a fuss much greater than it oughter,
There spend its rage, nor shower upon the hills,
To wet those natives who’ve no umberills !

Source: Geneva Courier, August 16, 1842

At head of poem: “Our Tim has left at the Falls the following.”  This note and the tone of the poem suggests that Timothy may have written this poem in the Table Rock Album, kept at Table Rock House in Niagara Falls, Ontario. There is no other information identifying Timothy.

Click here to see other poems in the Table Rock Album.

Also published in The Ovid Bee, August 10, 1842