Tag: niagara poet

Russell Street by Cole McInerney

russell
The Europa Hotel in Downtown Niagara Falls. Photo by Cole McInerney


And the street held silence for two strangers who didn’t have to stay that way.
We stood silent below lamplight in the magnetic time. 

Your suburban home stood parched in the dark and didn’t know me well.
Your mother stood at the northern window and pretended to be passing by.
The ten o’clock fireworks stood above the hotels and were heard in a tired sky.
Your roof stood parallel to that forgiving horizon. 

Your car stood locking and unlocking as we collided.
We stood silent across from fire station number three then went around your block again.
And in that silence we don’t celebrate the ending we just end up walking other ways. 

 

Source: The author, 2021

Russell Street was first published in The Continuist, May 10, 2020

Cole McInerney is a poet from Niagara Falls, Ontario. He studied English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently, he is a MFA student at the University of South Carolina, studying poetry. His poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Feral Poetry, White Wall Review, The Bookends Review, and Echolocation Magazine.

Follow Cole McInerney on Instagram

Follow Cole McInerney on Linktr.ee

See all of Cole McInerney’s poems on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website:

•     The Buildings of the Dream
•     Convenient Corner
•     Lake Erie
•     Russell Street

 

The Buildings of the Dream by Cole McInerney

mcinerney
Electric Power Transmission Corridor. Photo by Cole McInerney

The Riall Heights Plaza was a refuge in all weather 

You come
through the door,
yelling about the Republican Party
and the pandemic response,
high on speed.
Magnifying the voices
of breathless men
who score the TV.
Winning in the poll,
losing as I leave.

Racing the sparkling,
champagne SUVs
which pour down the street.
Asking for a truce
once they take the lead.
Passing a string of houses
with front yard pesticides
and driveway gates.
The kid sleeping inside,
born with a royal name.

Settling at the commercial plaza
which shelters a bar,
campaign office,
and other businesses;
which end and begin to end again.
Beneath the desperate cover
of a patio umbrella,
I find a childhood friend.
just as the rain collapses
on the peeling parking lot.

We talk about holidays,
the pitcher pricing,
and attempting to forget
every lie we’ve told,
as we create the next.
The rain moves on
in a moment of disbelief.
Likely toward downtown.
Standing to walk home, he says
you better not fucking die.

Source: The author, 2021

Cole McInerney is a poet from Niagara Falls, Ontario. He studied English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently, he is a MFA student at the University of South Carolina, studying poetry. His poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Feral Poetry, White Wall Review, The Bookends Review, and Echolocation Magazine

Follow Cole McInerney on Instagram

Follow Cole McInerney on Linktr.ee

See all of Cole McInerney’s poems on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website:

•     The Buildings of the Dream
•     Convenient Corner
•     Lake Erie
•     Russell Street

Lake Erie by Cole McInerney

lake
Waterfowl on Lake Erie. Photo by Cole McInerney

The tide rises,
suggesting the season,
stealing the stairs.
I sit in competition
with the horizon,
wondering which of us
blinks first.
Remembering the anniversary
of my grandmother’s death
to be eight or nine years ago,
yesterday.
On that last day
she struggled out of bed,
laughing at the difficulty.
My grandfather
helped the tanker ships
retire from the lake,
until the ice breaks.

The tide recedes,
suggesting the season,
returning the stairs.
I think of you
rather than sleep,
ignoring my eyes
and the moth at the screen.
A stranger with your voice
laughs on the beach,
staggering into the water,
hurrying back out.
Eventually I dream,
within it you write to me.
In the caverns of the fantasy,
the landscape blinked.
The light at its farthest reach
sank into the sea,
and we laughed at the difficulty.

Source: The author, 2021

Cole McInerney is a poet from Niagara Falls, Ontario. He studied English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently, he is a MFA student at the University of South Carolina, studying poetry. His poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Feral Poetry, White Wall Review, The Bookends Review, and Echolocation Magazine.

Follow Cole McInerney on Instagram

Follow Cole McInerney on Linktr.ee

See all of Cole McInerney’s poems on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website:

•     The Buildings of the Dream
•     Convenient Corner
•     Lake Erie
•     Russell Street

Unheard Niagaras by A. Ethelwyn Wetherald

wetherald
Portrait of Ethelwyn Wetherald. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

We live among unheard Niagaras.
The force that pushes up the meadow grass,
That swells to ampler roundness ripening fruit,
That lifts the brier rose, were it not mute,
Would thunder o’er the green earth’s sunlit tracts
More loudly than a myriad cataracts.

Source: Wetherald, A. Ethelwyn. Lyrics and Sonnets, Complete Edition. Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1931

Read about Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald on the Brock University Archives site. Wetherald lived her later years in Pelham, a few miles from Niagara Falls.

Achilles in Time and Space by David Hobberlin

achilles 

achilles
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.