Tag: Niagara Falls

Meditation at Niagara Falls, New York by Joey Nicoletti

nicoletti
Meditation at Niagara Falls
by Joey Nicoletti

The day breaks like a glacier.
My mind is an aria of fever, in red air ablaze,
a clammy crescendo, as I talk on the phone

with friends and colleagues
during a meeting where I am supposed to be
attending in person. But I am too sick

to be around people. I cough. My thoughts sink
like rocks in a lake
as everyone speaks. I look

on my laptop screen: my friend Alan, eyebrows
and tuxedo on fleek, posing with Tony Lo Bianco, star
of stage and screen, for a picture taken

by his spouse, freshly posted
on Facebook and The Gram.
My soul is a waterfall, cascading

as I take another pill; as I sip another cup
of Chamomile tea, my joints aching,
I say goodbye and hang up. I thank

the man upstairs for my spouse’s chicken soup; I think
of how Washington DC would be
a closed amusement park to me

if I was there like I planned; asking Tony what it was like
to have worked with Gene Hackman, who is
sometimes Popeye Doyle to me, other times Lex Luthor,

as well as Roy Scheider, both of whom were
in The French Connection with him. But I think
of Roy as Chief Brody in Jaws, ever since

since I was 10 years old, when I saw
French Connection and Jaws on TV, Cable
for the first time. Roy died

in 2008. The way I feel today
makes me think of my own death: would any
of the people I spoke with earlier

go to my wake or funeral
if I die before them? How long
will I suffer? Will I be alone?

Will I be in my own bed? Or in a hospital room,
like all of the women, natives and immigrants alike
in my family thus far? A hospice? A different country?

I am home. I have not left it
in a week, but it feels as if I have returned
from my nation’s capital.

I am not afraid exactly, but I have more
questions and concerns,
all of which will be answered in time;

all of which will be addressed in time;
like snow later on tonight; the weatherman
with the dashing moustache on TV, remarking

about a couple bundled up in Cobalt
blue jackets, their laughter sprays in water
onto a rusted hand rail, my head on fire.

Source: Leveler, issue 15, Summer 2016

Joey Nicoletti’s first book, Cannoli Gangster, was a finalist for the 2009 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Boombox Serenade, Thundersnow, Reverse Graffiti, and Fan Mail, which was published by Broadstone Books in 2021. Nicoletti currently teaches at SUNY Buffalo State.

Order Fan Mail from https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/fan-mail-poetry-by-joey-nicoletti.

Niagara by Harry Amoss

amoss
Harry Amoss
from the Forgotten Poets of the First World War website

How strangely human your adventured way !
From boundlessness you come.       An infancy
‘Tween parent banks you spend in fretless glee
Ere adolescent drives exert their sway
And churn your waters white.   Then comes the day
You take the plunge of destiny,  to be
Thenceforth a man;  and,  filled with urgency
A purpose to pursue,   charge to the fray
Of strenuous enterprise.     With sharp dismay
You sense the walls you dug so joyously
Are closing in on life,  and to break free
Your waters vainly whirl and rage till they
Find calm and comfort in acceptancy
And drift to join again the boundless sea.

Source: The Tower: The Poets of the Niagara Peninsula.  The Tower Poetry Society, 1958.

Read about Harry Amoss

Niagara Daredevil, 37, Buried Near the Falls by Gwendolyn MacEwen

My apologies to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s family for initially publishing this poem on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website without waiting for proper copyright permission.  It has been removed at the family’s request.

The poem, about daredevil Karel Soucek, was published  in Poetry Canada Review, vol. 8, no. 4,  1987

Read about Gwendolyn MacEwen

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