Print #46: Silver Waterfall

The moonlight has fallen upon the gray rocks. They stay motionless against the fast-flowing rapids of silvery falls. A single golden leaf holds on for its life. The last days of autumn.

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Inspirational Poems

Waterfall

It takes me into a liquid state of being
Full of Euphoric feelings and memories
As each water droplet lands upon my figure
I am demobilized into deep thought
I join the fall as one
As though i have joined a shapeless exsistance
All humane thoughts and feelings run from me
Each droplet they agglutinate

I am but an inchoate form
Full of feelings and senses
When i feel the waterfall
It touches my soul
We see the waterfall as only meretricious
But i have seen it for what it really is

Another realm to perfection
Calming and soul touching
The nearest a living soul will get to heaven
In this liquid rhinestone lies my feelings
And my thoughts, of which only i know it contains
I become the waterfall and the waterfall becomes me.

Ian Humphreys

An Ulster County Waterfall

I JOT this memory in a wild scene of woods and hills, where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy—what I call weather-beaten and let-alone—a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild-flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse impetuous copious fall—the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent waters, plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam—a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume—every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary and savage—not ten visitors a year—broken rocks everywhere—shade overhead, thick underfoot with leaves—a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Prose Works. 1892.

The Singing River

The river tumbles onwards to the sea,
And rushes, racing over rocks and stones,
And boulders, branches, pebbles, sand and scree,
Singing so many melodies to me,
In whispering notes and thunderous roaring tones.

Music that lingers in the ears and mind,
Soothing confusing thoughts that come my way,
Easing all stress, so my spirit is resigned,
To watching its water ripple, swirl, glide and wind,
And giving a soft contentment to my day.

Always there, this river, which is never still,
And every night and day, how strong it flows,
Into each pool, each inlet and each new rill,
It does, my thirsty soul, with pleasure fill,
And sets my thoughts on peace, and my 'being' glows.

Ernestine Northover

Between the Rapids

Archibald Lampman (1861–99)

THE POINT is turned; the twilight shadow fills
The wheeling stream, the soft receding shore,
And on our ears from deep among the hills
Breaks now the rapids’ sudden quickening roar.
Ah, yet the same! or have they changed their face,
The fair green fields, and can it still be seen,
The white log cottage near the mountain’s base,
So bright and quiet, so home-like and serene?
Ah, well I question, for as five years go,
How many blessings fall, and how much woe.

Aye there they are, nor have they changed their cheer,
The fields, the hut, the leafy mountain brows;
Across the lonely dusk again I hear
The loitering bells, the lowing of the cows,
The bleat of many sheep, the stilly rush
Of the low whispering river, and, through all,
Soft human tongues that break the deepening hush
With faint-heard song or desultory call:
O comrades, hold! the longest reach is past;
The stream runs swift, and we are flying fast.

The shore, the fields, the cottage, just the same,
But how with them whose memory makes them sweet?
Oh, if I called them, hailing name by name,
Would the same lips the same old shouts repeat?
Have the rough years, so big with death and ill,
Gone lightly by and left them smiling yet?
Wild black-eyed Jeanne whose tongue was never still,
Old wrinkled Picaud, Pierre and pale Lisette,
The homely hearts that never cared to range,
While life’s wide fields were filled with rush and change.

And where is Jacques, and where is Verginie?
I cannot tell; the fields are all a blur.
The lowing cows whose shapes I scarcely see,
Oh, do they wait and do they call for her?
And is she changed, or is her heart still clear
As wind or morning, light as river foam?
Or have life’s changes borne her far from here,
And far from rest, and far from help and home?
Ah comrades, soft, and let us rest awhile,
For arms grow tired with paddling many a mile.

The woods grow wild, and from the rising shore
The cool wind creeps, the faint wood odors steal;
Like ghosts adown the river’s blackening floor
The misty fumes begin to creep and reel.
Once more I leave you, wandering toward the night,
Sweet home, sweet heart, that would have held me in;
Whither I go I know not, and the light
Is faint before, and rest is hard to win.
Ah, sweet ye were and near to heaven’s gate;
But youth is blind and wisdom comes too late.

Blacker and loftier grow the woods, and hark!
The freshening roar! The chute is near us now,
And dim the canyon grows, and inky dark
The water whispering from the birchen prow.
One long last look, and many a sad adieu,
While eyes can see and heart can feel you yet,
I leave sweet home and sweeter hearts to you,
A prayer for Picaud, one for pale Lisette,
A kiss for Pierre, my little Jacques, and thee,
A sigh for Jeanne, a sob for Verginie.

Oh, does she still remember? Is the dream
Now dead, or has she found another mate?
So near, so dear; and ah, so swift the stream;
Even now perhaps it were not yet too late.
But, oh, what matter; for, before the night
Has reached its middle, we have far to go:
Bend to your paddles, comrades; see, the light
Ebbs off apace; we must not linger so.
Aye thus it is! Heaven gleams and then is gone.
Once, twice, it smiles, and still we wander on.