Poetry of and about Niagara Falls & the Niagara River – the waterfalls, the city, the history, the stunters, and everything else Niagara
The startled traveler wakes to the thunder by his pillow,
rises and climbs among old trees to the roaring brink:
in the deep night, heaven and earth one vista of white;
the moon comes, parting the mile-high curtain of pearls.
Translated by Burton Watson
Source: Watson, Burton (tr.). Japanese Literature in Chinese, vol. 2: Poetry & Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Later Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976
Read about Narushima Ryūhoku on Wikipedia
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.
‘Down, down, down, ten thousand fathoms deep.’
—Count Fathom.
Who does not know that dreadful gulf, where Niagara falls,
Where eagle unto eagle screams, to vulture vulture calls;
Where down beneath, Despair and Death in liquid darkness grope,
And upward, on the foam there shines a rainbow without Hope;
While, hung with clouds of Fear and Doubt, the unreturning wave
Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave;
And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to bale or bliss;
One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss!
Oh, Heav’n! it turns me now to ice, with chill of fear extreme,
To think of my frail bark adrift on that tumultuous stream!
In vain with desperate sinews, strung by love of life and light,
I urged that coffin, my canoe, against the current’s might:
On—on—still on—direct for doom, the river rush’d in force,
And fearfully the stream of Time raced with it in its course.
My eyes I closed—I dared not look the way towards the goal;
But still I view’d the horrid close, and dreamt it in my soul.
Plainly, as through transparent lids, I saw the fleeting shore,
And lofty trees, like winged things, flit by for evermore;
Plainly,—but with no prophet sense—I heard the sullen sound,
The torrent’s voice—and felt the mist, like death-sweat gathering round.
O agony! O life! My home! and those that made it sweet:
Ere I could pray, the torrent lay beneath my very feet.
With frightful whirl, more swift than thought, I passed the dizzy edge,
Bound after bound, with hideous bruise, I dashed from ledge to ledge,
From crag to crag,—in speechless pain,—from midnight deep to deep;
I did not die,—but anguish stunn’d my senses into sleep.
How long entranced, or whither dived, no clue I have to find:
At last the gradual light of life came dawning o’er my mind;
And through my brain there thrill’d a cry,—a cry as shrill as birds’
Of vulture or of eagle kind, but this was set to words:—
‘It’s Edgar Huntley in his cap and nightgown, I declares!
He’s been a walking in his sleep, and pitch’d all down the stairs!’
Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown that was popular at the time this poem was written.
Source: Thomas Hood. The Works of Thomas Hood: Comic, in Prose and Verse, with all the Original Illustrations. vol. 1. London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1882
Annie Edson Taylor
Wanted to be first over the falls
A school teacher from New York
She was gonna’ show them all
She had a custom barrel made
But first tested it on a cat
The poor thing plunged over the falls
It had no say, cause that was that
Luckily the cat emerged
A little tattered but still alive
So on her 63rd birthday, 1901
Ms. Taylor, finally took her dive
They called her Queen of the Mist
Queen of the Mist
The first to conquer the falls
But in real actuality
The cat deserved it all
The glory, the title, the award for the first
The cat deserves it all
Cause the Queen of the Mist, the Queen of the Mist
Was the second to conquer the Falls
She peddled her wares for many a day
As souvenirs to passers by
‘Til her manager ran off with the famous barrel
And the detectives bled her dry
She swore she’d never do such a feat again
That once, was already too much
They say she lived from hand to mouth
And the fame was never enough
But the tawdry cat he lived the life
Fat on rats and crumpets and tea
Everyone wanted to know the cat
Who was famous, as famous can be
Sometimes you can hear them play their jazz
Near midnight along the old lagoon
They call him King of the Mist
And so they wrote him this tune…..
©2020 by Diana Williamson
Source: Diana Williamson, 2020
WHERE the great cataract, Niagara, fills
The air with mist, the earth with shuddering sound,
A winding path leads to the utmost verge
And down the steep a narrow stair is flung,
Confronting in its fragile nothingness
The world of hurling waters. There, alone,
A blind girl stands. As on the dizzy brink
Of Alpine heights, a snowdrop half afraid
Hangs trembling petals o’er the dark abyss
White-robed she bends above the roaring gulf
And clasps with timid hands the slender rail
That guards the deep descent. A pale, sweet face
Upraised to wonders that she cannot see,
And tremulous with passionate despair,
Half-parted lips that in their tender curves
Droop mournfully, and heavy lashes wet
With sad and hopeless tears.
Before her sweeps
The crystal glory rounding from the rock
And melting into mists of pearl and rose.
A thousand changing tints of opal light,
Bright magic blossoms of the sunlit wave,
Flash upward in their flights of fairy bloom
Like garlands tossed in triumph to the sky.
Higher and higher in showers of starry spray
Till one wild leap flings to the farthest crag
Its vivid splendour, and across the foam
There glows a rainbow arch of victory!
But not for her the beauty or the power,
She hears the sound of mighty harmonies
And vainly pictures the Unseen. And yet
Not hers, not hers the pain that wrings the heart
Of one who gazes on her sightless eyes,
And knows not why the kind, the cruel world
Holds Blindness and Niagara!
So stands
The soul who comes at last to that dim verge
Where Reason falters and where Science fails,
These were his chosen guides who led him far
Down shadowy vistas of the shrouded past
Through myriad forms of faint, primeval life
Back to the great First Cause,—a step, and then
He hears the waters of Eternity
Sounding mysterious music through the night,
He trembles on the verge of the Unknown,—
The Darkness closes round him—he is blind!
Oh, Light of faith! touch thou his closèd eyes,
And lo! the vision of a rainbow flung
Across the viewless depths of Time and Space,—
A sacramental splendour set aloft
In sevenfold glory, mystical, divine,
To span the gulf that lies ‘twixt God and Man!
Source: Lily Alice Lefevre. A Garden by the Sea and Other Poems. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1921.