Tag: Niagara River

The Other Way Around by Azaghen Ramasamy

ramasamy
Azaghen Ramasamy and his dogs

I sit on the patio.
The Budapest Bake Shop welcomes me,
where summer lingers
in old brick walls,
and curious strangers stroll by
with lives I will never know,
while somewhere past the rooftops
the river keeps its one long sentence,
never finished, never still.

And somehow,
in this little café,
you are here.
Not in the chair beside me,
not across the table,
but somewhere between
the sunlight and my coffee,
between a song I remember
and a face the years could not erase—
the way the mist over the falls
is neither water nor air,
but both, and neither, and always.

I first heard of you
before I ever saw you—
a name in an article written by a cruel man,
a girl, an actress, called ugly
before she had even become a woman.
I wanted to know
why the world was so unkind to you.

Then came your long jet black mane,
your hand brushing it back,
and suddenly
the girl they had dismissed
was the most beautiful woman
I had ever seen—
beauty like the falls themselves,
ignored by the ones who live beside it,
undeniable to everyone who travels far to see it.

I was young.
You were impossibly far away.
So I wrote letters
across an ocean,
the way this river carries everything downstream
and asks nothing back.
They never reached you.

Years passed.
The world moved on,
the way water moves on,
the same falls, never the same water twice.

And then, somehow,
you found me.

You once told me
you were nothing.
I wish I could return
to that moment
and place this entire world
before you—
every photograph,
every forgotten film,
every person who now stops
to look at your face
the way they stop here,
at the rail, in the spray,
just to say: I saw it.

Not to tell you
that you were a star.
Only this:
You were seen.

And this summer evening,
on Queen Street,
your image reflects the sun
from my phone,
while Niagara breathes behind me—
that same unbroken roar
that has said the same thing
for ten thousand years,
and somehow still sounds new.

I raise my coffee
to you—
you who disappeared
from the world’s attention
but never disappeared
from mine,
no more than the falls disappear
when the tourists go home
and the lights go dark
and it keeps falling anyway.

Perhaps I spent forty years
trying to keep your memory alive,
only to discover
you were the one
who kept something alive in me—
the way the river doesn’t remember the rain
that first filled it,
and rushes on regardless,
carrying it still.

Source: The author, 2026. 

This poem won First Place in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. It will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.

Azaghen Ramasamy is a Mauritian-born Canadian poet and writer based in Ontario. His work explores memory, distance, beauty, and the complicated ways in which people and places remain with us long after time has moved on. His poetry often brings the past into conversation with the present, using landscapes and ordinary moments as doorways into personal memory. A lifelong student of history and human stories, he is particularly drawn to lives that have been misunderstood, overlooked, or forgotten. He writes in both English and French.

Twenty-Two Spans by Jatin Garg

Watch the video on ice monitoring and the ice boom 

Clip your vest before you touch the line.
Then look where your boots are.
A cable under strain moves faster than you.
If it jumps, I can’t pull you clear.

The report calls this Phase Three.
We call it taking the strings off the breakwall,
towing them out from Buffalo,
making the mouth of Erie ready for winter.

Most pontoons: thirty feet of sealed steel,
thirty inches through, black and blunt.
Nothing graceful about it.
In a west wind, don’t waste motion.

Raise the junction plate. Fasten the buoy barrel.
Water comes over the barge while you line up the three-inch pin.
Watch the tug, not the gulls.
When I say easy, ease.
Never stand inside the bight.

At the intake crib, thirty feet under, they read the lake.
We start at thirty-nine degrees,
or on December sixteenth if the lake stays warmer.
High wind and waves can still stop us.

You asked where Canada starts.
At the chart table I’ll show you after shift.
Here, the anchor cables are numbered,
the spans lettered A through V.
The power companies divide the invoice exactly.
The weather does not.

Don’t call it a dam.
Water goes under from the first day to the last.
The steel gives loose ice a place to gather,
to freeze into its own arch
instead of running down the Niagara
toward shoreline docks and the power intakes.

In a hard winter, a west wind can stack ice twelve feet.
The boom may sink. It is made for that.
Ice rides over. Pressure passes. The pontoons rise.
Write overtopped.
Engineering will ask whether it failed.

You think I repeat myself. I do.
My first year I stepped inside the bight.
Frank swore once, pulled me back by the collar,
then went on fastening shackles.
I don’t remember what he called me.
I remember both my hands.

At night a camera watches what we built.
Most winters nobody phones. That is a good winter.
Turbines keep turning. Shoreline docks stay put.
Twenty-two miles downstream, near the Falls,
less ice reaches the power intakes.

By spring we count what remains on eastern Erie,
wait for safe water, loosen the buoy barrels,
tow every scarred string up the Buffalo River
and pull it into dry storage.

At the last span I tell you, “Pull the pin.”
You look at your boots first.
Good.

Span A swings free, blunt nose toward the Niagara.
The current takes the slack.
You give it room.

Source: Jatin Garg, 2026.

This poem won an Honourable Mention in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. It will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.

Jatin Garg is a fiction writer and poet from India whose work explores relationships, identity, memory, and the quiet pressures of everyday life. Drawn to people, places, and the ways history lingers, he combines close observation with imagination to find something unfamiliar inside ordinary experience. 

The Contest is finished!

finished
The 25th Anniversary Poetry Contest submission period has now finished. Thanks to all of the people who submitted their poems.

Poems came from across North America, with others from the United Kingdom, Sweden, India, Indonesia, and a few that I don’t know where they’re from.

The poems are now going into the judges’ hands for scoring. Once they come back to me I will tally the scores and then be able to announce the winners. The winners’ poems will be added to the website at that point. I don’t envy the judges during the scoring process. There were so many good poems that were entered it will be hard to make a decision.

As the judging is being done I will be selecting and compiling the poems into book format (depending on the size and cost of the book not all entires may necessarily be added to the book). That will be completed after the winners are announced, and the manuscript will be sent to Phylum Press to complete the printing process, with the publication date to be announced later. We will be taking advance orders.

After the book is published the non-winning entries will be added to the website. 

Once again, thanks to all of the poets from around the world who entered the contest.

Gorgeous by Ken Gierke

gierke
Great Blue Heron in the Niagara Glen
Photo by Ken Gierke

Consider the river that cares not
what man thinks of it, churning
over obstacles that will not impede it
in a gorgeous canyon, miles from
a roaring cataract yet filled with the sound
of a rapid staccato best heard at the water’s edge,
that edge approached with peril for it cares not
what safety one desires when near, its own safety
never at stake, raging as it does at the disservice
served upon it, the waters it carries never truly clean,
yet powerless, despite its power, to change that course.

Now walk the trails that lie beside it, trails
that care not whether they are trod by soled feet
or the pads of wildlife content to share
with those who understand the fragile nature
of their home, this pocket of green. Marvel
at the escarpment that once was the falls
as the river wore at its limestone foundation
in its inexorable march to the current home
of those falls. Move briefly through shadow
between boulders larger than a house,
cleaved from the side of the wall towering
above you, as you wind your way to the river.

Watch a heron pull a fish from the water as you sit
on the rocks at the river’s edge, then gaze
at the roiling water beside you, sun glinting
from the foam of the rapids. Follow that light
to see the sun approach the crest of the gorge,
all the while taking in the green that surrounds you,
green that would not be had it not been preserved
by those who understand its fragile nature.

Source: The author, 2026. First published 2021 at Earthweal

This poem was inspired by walks in the gorge at Niagara Glen. The attached photo of a great blue
heron was taken there.

Watch Ken Gierke perform Gorgeous

Ken Gierke was born and raised in Western New York and, since moving to Missouri in 2012, has
missed Niagara Falls the most. He was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been featured
online and in numerous print anthologies. His four poetry collections from Spartan Press, Glass Awash
(1922), Heron Spirit (2024), Random Riffs (2025), and The Long Haul (2026), are available on
Amazon. More of his poetry can be found at https://rivrvlogr.com/.

About Gorgeous:

This poem is my response to earthweal weekly challenge: Sanctuary, a challenge now closed, so I’m sharing it with earthweal open link weekend #71.

The Niagara River, the strait of water between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, carries all of the water of the upper Great Lakes. Much of the thirty-six mile length of the river was lined with industry, including within the gorge below Niagara Falls. The majority of that industry is gone, with the few remaining on the US side in the stretch north of Buffalo. While stricter regulations and ambitious cleanup campaigns, from the late twentieth century onward, reversed much of the degradation of the lakes during the industrial era, toxic sediments still exist and agricultural runoff remains a serious problem. The Canadian side of the Niagara River is a true parkway, maintained by Niagara Parks of Ontario. Beyond the falls, from the whirlpool to the end of the gorge is Niagara Glen, where a stairway descends the gorge wall to join four miles of trails that lead to the river’s edge as they wind through a Carolinian forest. When I lived in New York, I often crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls, just to walk those trails. The rapids within the gorge range from Class III to Class V.

The Late Fisherman in the Niagara Gorge by T. W. Kriner

fisherman
Fisherman on Rock in Niagara River Just Above the Falls. Photo by Andrew Porteus, March 27, 2003

While trying to rescue his tackle box,
he tripped into the current from his perch on the rocks.
He floundered then foundered and, just like a stone,
he went to the bottom. He died there alone.

Source: The author, 2025. First published in T.W. Kriner.  The Red Pill and Other Poems. Buffalo: J & J Publishing, 2026.

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.

The Late Fisherman in the Niagara Gorge is loosely based on an incident witnessed by Kriner’s son’s father-in-law.

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.