John Newmark lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife and two children. An avid family historian, his 5th great grandfather, McGregory Vanevery, was one of the original settlers of Niagara, Ontario. He enjoys writing poetry about his ancestors, and the places they lived. Visit his website.
Unknown group having a picnic in Queen Victoria Park, Niagara Falls, July, 1927 From the Niagara Parks Commission Collection, Niagara Falls Public Library
Forceful rush of water, loud
flowing toward the precipice,
I stood alongside the grassy edge
of the Niagara River, shoes kicked off,
toes independently investigating
blades of grass and dandelions.
Standing away from a blanket
spread with our wicker picnic
basket, cloth napkins and cooler,
my mother’s eyes were shadowed
behind dark glasses, but I knew
they were on me and the wild
river behind, the smell of
a steel plant, an acrid invasion
to mingle odors with moisture filled air.
So close to the water, she shook her head
when I begged to wade, not knowing
the demon force would sweep
a child away like so many memories.
We picnicked with a game
of brightly colored rings, tossed
to my father and to my brother
who leapt up to catch the red one.
My mother sedentary in contrast to
the activity of family games
beside the raging river.
Julie A. Dickson
Niagara River 1965 written 2018, previously unpublished.
Julie A. Dickson is originally from Buffalo, NY. Her father’s family was from Guelph and Vineland Station, Ontario, Canada in the late 1800’s, they founded the Culverhouse Canning Factory there. Dickson lived near Lake Erie and Niagara Falls until her early teens, when her family relocated to Massachusetts. Always the lakes-girls, her poems often reflect in memories of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and visiting the falls. Her poems appears in many journals including Ekphrastic Review, Misfit, Open Door and others; full length works on Amazon. Dickson has been a guest editor, past poetry board member, is an advocate for captive elephants and shares her home with two rescued cats.
Julie A. Dickson was the guest editor of the Ekphrastic Review challenge to write a poem inspired by Frederic Edwin Church’s painting Niagara, 1857. See a page about ekphrastic poetry, including the poems from the Ekphrastic Review
Niagara is a revelation of the cosmos to each and every man.
— David C. Huntington
Sure, I’ll breathe poetry there. My mind will be an embouchure
through which your powerful waters pour thunder. I will hear
nothing else, not the sharp sound waves spearing my bellows,
nor honeymooners whose croons you swallow into white foam
and spew out as a shimmering arch of rainbow. You’ll teach me
about the cosmos by proving the paradox of water in motion:
that its motion is a stillness, that its stillness is ever in motion.
My body will be a speck of silence swallowed by your howling
emerald olivine chrysoberyl pale blue ice snowy pinnacles,
your ten-thousand-year-old ceaselessly cataracting avalanche,
your constant breath ever billowing through one diapason,
yet not one prism in your mist ever splits light the same way.
Like that bared jagged root snagged on your brink, I’d abide
inside your relentless remaking. Eyes on a digital or hands
on a canvas covered with smooth strokes would never equal
the whole of me, mind, body, heart and soul, all immersed
in the whole of your eloquence greater even than my whole
world, you patient shale-shaper, finale of the Niagara River,
you Ice Age’s fossil water, you rhapsody of ancient glaciers
ever burgeoning into new birth, you under whose arcades
lovers sport crowned with bright sprays, you whose sheer
impetus splashes the sun’s and moon’s incandescent faces,
I keep calling you Whirlpool, Horseshoe, Luna Falls, Iris Falls
and you chant to purple clouds a booming Gravity is Grace.
Lucie Chou is an ecopoet working in mainland China. Currently an undergraduate majoring in English language and literature, she is also interested in the ecotone between ekphrasis and ecopoetics, and in exploring the magic presences of other-than-human living beings bleeding into the lonely arrogance of human experience. Her work has appeared in the Entropy magazine, the Black Earth Institute Blog, the Tiny Seed Journal website, The Ekphrastic Review, Transom, and in the Plant Your Words Anthology published by Tiny Seed Press. A poem is forthcoming in from Tofu Ink Arts, both in print and online. She has published a debut collection of ecopoetry, Convivial Communiverse, with Atmosphere Press. She hikes, gardens, and studies works of natural history by Victorian writers with gusto. In August 2023, she participated in the Tupelo Press 30 / 30 project where she fundraised for the indie press by writing one poem each day for a month. She writes for a constellation of brilliant readers hopefully including street trees and feral animals she encounters in each city she travels to.
Portly Bard. Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent… of verse becoming complement… …and by such homage being lent… ideally also compliment.
Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise for words but from returning gaze far more aware of fortune art becomes to eyes that fathom heart.
A mountain of snow and Ice almost reaching the crest of the American Falls at Niagara Falls Undated photo by Gisela Scholz. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
I am shown
a generosity
so muddied
at the muddy bottom
of a question I forget to ask
until it’s fished out
but bloated but
in the manner of a net
a web of causal connections
attached to its corners
