Tag: tourists

Niagara Falls by Lucy Yeend Culler

culler
Niagara Falls, where the Great Lakes leap to the sea. Travel by train.
Advertising poster by Fredric C. Madan, c1925
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

All my plans were made for summer ;
For vacation trips and parties,
Pleasant drives into the country,
Feasting on the young, spring chicken,
Golden maize with milky kernels,
Luscious berries, harvest apples,
New potatoes, peas, and lettuce,
Tender onions, sliced cucumber,
Home-made bread and freshest butter.
‘Mong the trips the most desirous,
Was to be to grand Niagara,
With its ever-flowing water.
Grandest spectacle of nature !
Bringing awe and praise and wonder
From the creature to Creator.
But the maiden of the household,
Happy maid, sweet Violet,
Made a visit to her grandma’s.
There the scarlet fever caught her ;
Touched her throat with horrid soreness ;
Stretched her on a bed of sickness ;
Covered all her flesh with redness ;
Filled her veins with surging fury ;
Touched her ears with pain and deafness ;
Left her pale and thin and helpless.
When the direful news came to us
Of her sickness in the country,
Quickly, then, we hastened to her ;
Watched her couch by night, by day time ;
Soothed her with our words of comfort ;
Cheered her with the brightest flowers ;
Cooled the fevered lips and temples ;
Coaxed the cheeks again to blooming ;
Won her back to health and sunshine.
But the fever, wretched fever,
Stole away the gentle summer
And the early part of autumn ;
Till vacation days were ended ;
Parties, drives, and trips suspended.
But I’ve promised, oh, I’ve promised
The New Era a narration
Of Niagara’s far-famed beauty.
Time to go is not my choosing.
Excursion rates departing, scorn me.
Pocket-book groans not with fatness,
For its failing is a flatness.
Whither shall I flee for succor ?
I will sit me down and ponder
On my sad condition, scheming
Some way out this painful darkness.
True I visited Niagara
Twenty years ago, depending
On excursion rates befriending.
It was in the time of wooing.
So I wrote my love a letter
Telling of the charming water,
Of Niagara’s power and thunder.
And I married that same lover,
And my letters he did treasure.
Treasured for the love they bore him.
Treasured for the thoughts they scored him.
I will turn that barrel over.
I will ferret out that letter.
I will doctor it and dress it.
I will give it to New Era.
Now at last I am in clover.

                (The Letter.)

Late in June, the month of roses,
Eighteen hundred, five and seventy,
In the dawning of the morning,
Stood a group of youths and maidens.
On a Cleveland street-car crossing,
With umbrellas spreading o’er them,
Sheltering from the copious showers.
Electric cars were not in vogue then.
Pokey horse-cars, long delaying,
Took us in at last, conveying
Us to depot, where we boarded
Train to take us to Niagara.
Jolly crowd was no misnomer,
Though the rain the trip did cover.
Strangers, none among the number
To molest, affright, or hinder.
Long before the time for dinner
We were hungry all as beavers,
And we seized the luncheon baskets
With a most unusual ardor.
And the roasted chicken vanished
In a most surprising manner.
Mattered not if breast or drum-stick,
Second joint or wing or gizzard,
All alike were soon disposed of ;
As were also fruits and dainties.
Pocket stoves did heat our coffee.
Limited the cups and spoons were.
So about a half a dozen
Were allowed but one small chalice ;
And one spoon for each six people.
When at home, the thought of using
Cups and spoons in common thusly,
Would be rather disagreeable.
But this restless, moving picnic
Banished all such notions quickly.
There’s a picture represents us,
In a book by rare Charles Dickens.
You have surely looked upon it.
There’s a row of half-starved scholars,
Lean and lank and wishful, looking
At a bowl containing supper,
Bread and milk for all the laddies.
The old beadle sits before them.
At his signal first boy swallows
All he can before the signal
For the second boy to taste it.
Thus the bowl and spoon keep moving.
Now I do not mean to tell you
We presented the same tableau,
For we looked not lean and hungry.
But I took a cup and numbered :
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Number one, I called ; and open
Flew the mouth of the first maiden.
I administered a spoonful
Of delicious, smoking coffee.
Number two was called as promptly.
Never youth more eager answered
As his lips he quickly parted
To imbibe the steaming coffee.
And so on till all were served ;
And the coffee all exhausted.
Still the rain did pour in torrents.
And some people seemed downhearted ;
So we sang the tunes our mothers
Sang to us in childhood golden,
Conjuring words to suit the occasion.
Thus we raised the drooping spirits.
And at last our journey ended,
Sunshine burst through clouds and darkness ;
Filling all our hearts with gladness.
Passing through the town, Niagara,
On our way to view the torrent,
Many shops enticed our glances.
Pretty trinkets carved from feld-spar,
Shining feld-spar from the boulders,
Where the mighty river floweth,
Souvenirs for gracious tourists.
But our footsteps hastened onward.
Onward, till we reached Goat Island
With its rocks and trees and river
Which divides the two great segments,
The American and Horseshoe.
Down the Inclined Plane we glided,
Breathless with the hurried speeding.
Thought we would not try the rapids
With a birch canoe for passage.
Prospect Park ! Oh, glorious station
To behold the wondrous beauty.
Grandeur most sublime and lofty.
Expectations all surpassing,
All imaginations drowning.
Wrapt in wonder and amazement
Stood we gazing on this splendor.
Magnificent, does not express it.
Words seem dumb to speak its praises.
Glorious sunshine bringing sparkles
To the sheets of foam unbroken.
Mists and vapors rising ever
Arched with an eternal rainbow.
Horse-shoe Falls ! The broad St. Lawrence
Concave precipice descending
Makes a picture soul-inspiring.
Graceful curving, rapid flowing,
Ocean tumbling from the cloud-land,
Thunder, fury, foam, and beauty
Tangling all together deftly.
Bridge suspended like a ribbon,
Spanning river makes a crossing
For pedestrian and carriage
O’er this wayward stream of water.
On this bridge we often halted
‘Fore we reached Canadian borders.
Then descended lengthy staircase,
A hundred steps both rude and rustic.
Table Rock ! how many tourists’
Feet have pressed thy surface rugged,
Overhanging foam and river.
Cave of the Winds ! Behind the torrent
Braving gale and mist and spraying
Donned in gossamers and creeping
Close behind the guide believing
We could do what others venture.
Faces dripping, courage slipping,
Water roaring like the thunder,
Filled our souls with awe and wonder.
Long we did not pause to ponder
For our thoughts were fraught with danger.
And we hastened, quickly hastened.
Back to sunlight, friends, and safety.
Are there any of our number
Who have never seen Niagara ?
Then I bid you hasten thither
While your life is spared for pleasure.
It will make your spirit purer.
It will make your God the dearer.
It will bring your heaven nearer.

Source:  Lucy Yeend Culler.  A Retrospect and Other Poems.  Dayton, Ohio: The Otterbein Press,  1914

Niagara by Richard Emil Braun

braun
Niagara Falls From Just South of the Brink of the Horseshoe Falls  April 27, 2023
Photo by Andrew Porteus

    Mist-moist, past the rainbow, we make a small row
    at the low wall on the Canadian side:
you, and the other, who, as we approached the roar,
    often and oftener groped your shoulder,
and I, a stranger almost, along for the ride.

        Hundreds of soulful strangers, high
    on the speedy water in their bodies,
    lean on this rail, couples, eyes full or floating,
            and all of them narcotized
        unawares, by the falls, through the eye,
    as veritably as by the needle
            they despise and call sinful.

    Apart from you two by two yards, I scan
    the American side for the rapids
I already know; see them as a harum-scarum
    taffeta cancan seesawing in sunlight,
now higgledy-piggledy, the grey then white shreds

            shown then withdrawn in the sexy
        wingding; and parted from you two and from
        the hundreds by the absence of love in me
                (replaced by a drug), I hear
            that other’s chitchat you answer curtly
        often and oftener shrill over the falls’
                singsong, and hear in it pain

    which I can not respect. Inspecting the falls
    itself at its summit, I see a vein
of the river split on stone, then mend, now folding, next
    unfolding until both blend in the mist;
and to you, who have left the other to his pain

        momentarily, and his camera,
    and have come near me, I liken the white
    currents to a groin and she-thighs widening
            and clenching. You disagree.
        I watch further. I feel Niagara
    fill my head through the crown and through my eyes.
            Soon, spilling out my mouth

    with breath, it returns; encircles my mind;
    builds silence. Flowing glee impels me to fall.
To fall, I mount the rail. Suddenly, in unison
    with my own thought, you shout It liquefies me!
I come down. Yes, yes, I tell you. The other, cool,

        gripping your shoulder, leads you again
    past the rainbow, under sobering mist.
    I follow. Later I tell you both 
            my own story (how I
        am free of love through medicine)
    and theorize about the hundreds there
            high on love and water.

    Safe where Niagara is almost hidden
    and merely a moist whirr reveals its action,
we two juggle the topic literally.
    The third, unsure, shuffles picture postcards.
In the park, near the car in expectation

        of franker words in privacy,
    I ask again. I hear you, a blur, naming 
    a seminary where, at dawn, you would run
            in pairs or by fours, downwards,
        swung to a circular valley,
    hills of daisies, grey and white folds, low, up,
            lower, to swim secretly.

Source: Richard Emil Braun.  The Foreclosure: Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

Previously published in Fresco, [1964?]

Also published in Richard Elman & Robert O’Clair (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. W. W. Norton, 1973

From acknowledgements in The Foreclosure:
The President’s Medal of the University of Western Ontario was awarded in 1965 for Niagara as the best poem to appear in a Canadian magazine during the previous year.

Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha

I was driving, you took over the stereo. That Lucinda song
I’d never heard. Lodestar too. We ate bad pizza.
You beat me at Skee-ball. We must have looked at the falls—
I remember how nervous you were at the blackjack table.
How I learned you are afraid of heights, handsome
in any T-shirt. How I dared you to charm the girl
at the prize counter, just so I could watch you—
I held your hand,  wanted to take your arm.
 
It’s almost impossible to imagine you then,
in that tacky motel,
not yet my partner, no longer my friend, so newly
my lover. The roar of the water— even when you don’t hear it,
it pours and pours, erasing the rock underneath.
nolan
Nolan Natasha and the cover of their book
I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?


Niagara Falls by Nolan Natasha was published in their book I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me (Invisible Publishing, 2019) and the performed version is the second episode of I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?  YouTube channel. On this channel Nolan creates videos inspired by poems and short narratives.

 

From their website:

I am a queer and trans writer, performer, and filmmaker. 

Of Faroese and English ancestry, I am a settler living on unceded Mi’Kmaw territory in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. I have been a finalist for the CBC poetry prize, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry prize, the Geist postcard contest, and was the runner-up for the Thomas Morton fiction prize. My debut poetry collection, I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? was released in the fall of 2019 with Invisible Publishing. I am currently working on a collection of short stories and a series of video poems.

 

Under the Falls by James Penha

under
James Penha and His Husband, Ferdy, Shortly After Their Wedding Ceremony, on the Maid of the Mist Boat in Front of the American Falls
Image courtesy of James Penha

 

My memories begin with the cascade
of tears at Niagara Falls as I screamed
NO when my father led us to board
the boat he said would be sailing
“under the Falls.” Under the Falls,
he said. Distinctly Under the Falls.
Not near, not close to, but under.
What three-year-old would not weep
uncontrollably, unstoppingly, until 
assured there would be no boat ride
that day or the next. Seventy years 
later, right after marrying his husband
at Niagara Falls City Hall, the old boy
kissed his mate on The Maid of the Mist 
as it carried them crying and laughing
quite safely not quite under the Falls.

Source: The author, 2022

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

Ode to Niagara by Lansing V. Hall

hall
Canada Southern Railway Train and Cars, American & Horseshoe Falls in Background
executed by the American Oleograph Co. Image Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

MAJESTIC river, full of awe and wonder,
Roll onward in thy might, and roar like thunder ;
Bring from the upper lakes where the waters nap,
Thy burthens to this brink, and let ‘ em drap.
Roll onward in thy wrath, and foam and spatter ;
My bark is on dry land—that’s what’s the matter.
To pay for all this splurge, there’s a Lincoln cent,
I’ve dropped it in thy surge—so let it went !
If more thou still demand, there’s a Canada copper,
Large as a full-blown moon-put that in your hopper !
Methinks I feel a bug, and hear him hum ;
‘Tis only the “Maid of the Mist,” for passengers come.
I’ve climbed the weary stairs, the steps I’ve counted,
But wish now by the cars and ropes I’d mounted.
My coat is wet with spray, but my throat is dry ;
This scene is grand, they say, but it’s all in their eye.
I’ve heard of thee, Niagara, and now I’ve found thee ;
But sorry thou dost keep such robbers round thee.
The Yankees stole my purse, John Bull my hat,
And my last disputed stamp I paid to Pat.
So now I’ve nothing left, as I’m a sinner,
To recompense “mine host” for his dollar dinner.
But hold ! I have it now—there goes the bell !
I’ll sell my ode, I vow ! Old stream, farewell !
Should e’er we meet again, with case inverted,
I, tumbling toward the main, thou, dry and deserted,
I’ll wet thy husky throat till thou feelest staggery,
And I’ll sprinkle well thy coat. Farewell, Niagara !
Should e’er we meet again this side the ocean,
I’ll sing in loftier strain my deep devotion ;
I’ll praise thy gorgeous bow till my voice shall quiver.
But the steam is up—we go. Good-by, old river !
Good-by ! the echoes die with the cataract thunder,
While away like the wind we fly to a western wonder,
Where objects meet the sight too marvelous to tell,
Where cities grow up in a night. Fogies, farewell !
For the golden land I’m bound, where the trees reach heaven,
With trunks four miles around—diameter seven ;
Where grapes like pumpkins grow in every dell,
Where corn needs plow nor hoe. Reader, farewell !
And when I’ve reached the shore by the “Great Pacific,”
I’ll carve on the depot door this hieroglyphic ;
A sleeping car, marked “through,” ‘neath a huge balloon,
Myself among the crew, labeled, “the moon.”

Source: L.V. Hall. Voices of Nature. New York: John A. Gray & Green, Printers, 1868.

In his  Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls, Charles Mason Dow writes “The author of this poem was blind. The “Ode” is evidently intended to be humorous, but the humor consists largely in slang and bad grammar.