Poem for Cleveland

Celebrate Northeast Ohio's rich literary scene this April — National Poetry Month — with this new work by longtime Cleveland poet Ray McNiece.

Good Friday

Wildwood’s granite jetty juts into fog walled Lake Erie waves lapping invisibly through sibilant mist and fat plops on Donegal tweed cap worn to honor ancestors who gathered on Cleveland’s shores.

This purgatorial soundscape for Good Friday’s gloom, called “soft weather” along Antrim’s coast where Cailleach cries her shroud of drizzle over the Slovenian babushka doddering down Lake Shore boulevard pushing her rusty shopping cart.

Both sides of my people merged here, got stuck here, their blood, piss and spit running down to this shore amid tough weeds and cracked brick landfill of Collinwood blocks. Sooty snow piles that just won’t melt are my birthright, soaking sodden foot bones, fly ash filling lungs.

The vesper bells from St. Mary’s, tamped by rain, call through gathering dusk. After mass, after gazing upon Mary’s Assumption over the altar, her blue gown trailing behind beatific face sunward, there will be a perch fry, and Carlings’ beer, and, with water from the Lake, soup, the dumplings like drowned suns.

Along with his work fronting Tongue In Groove, a local jam band, Ray McNiece regularly shares his poetry around town and hosts “Poem for Cleveland” workshops. Named Cleveland Heights' poet laureate, McNiece earned the Cleveland Arts Prize's lifetime achievement award in 2021. Find more information about his work at raymcniece.com.

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Since it was built in 1867, the farm has only had four owners. Its most recent tenant was Siegfried Buerling, Hale Farm & Village's longest serving director.