Best Cairn Poems

SUMMER SOLSTICE

Queen Meabh stood beside the cairn, her velvet cape fluttered in the night air,
She called onto the Goddess Aine to return the moon safe to its hidden lair. 
Braziers crackled as wood and turf warmed the dark hour before dawn’s light,
Na Fianna Warriors guarded...

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The beach gathers its dead. Thousands of horseshoe crabs
come home on the full moon’s tide. Their courting dances, 
scrawled with claw and carapace in the wet sand, leave
with the ghost hands of nursing Autumn wave.

Their nests of jewel-colored eggs, covered and soothed
seasoned in salt sea,...

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Grandma's Pets

My granda went away to sea
For many months on end
He'd travel on a fishing boat
With his brother and a friend

He used to write home regularly
And tell some quite tall tales
About being in a far-away place
When he was actually in Wales

Once they actually went to...

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  (  It seems the only thing eternal life has left me is eternal tears. 
For my lost son Christopher; named after the god who suffers. )



            


I knew you before I...

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Memories, someone asked?
Here’s one. Let me pull it out from the past,
Let me set it next to the grandfather clock in the parlor,
That used to count out time in chimes by the hour.
Mother is sitting in the corner armchair,
As if she had all the time...

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The Bichon Frise

The Bichon in chiffon looks so frou 
That the crowd duly wowed has to coo 
‘Til the dog starts to droop
And its owner to scoop 
Some acutely embarrassing doo

The Border Collie

It was not Albert Einstein who dared 
To think E = mc2
But rather...

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The wizard will know everyone I met along the way said.
Okay, I thought, for I am from Kansas and not daft in my head.
I looked for the curtain as I pranced down the yellow brick road.
Instead of Toto a cairn terrier, I was followed by...

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The Spirits of Culloden. 
This is like a pilgrimage, a try tae come every year,
Gather at the cairn, meet old friends, wipe away a tear.
Standin on that moor, that once with blood was sodden,
Paying respects to those loyal men and wimen, the spirits of Culloden.
This...

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O're the rock strewn shores of Loch Lomond, upon the glaciered northern rock,
A lonely, barren, desolate stand, refuge to ancient Gaelic stock.
In this land o're grown with heath, tween' a realm named Rannoch Liath, 
On a misty, dreary cairn,
There lived a lassie near the peaks,...

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Mother, I feel the weight the spinning world.
I feel each parental nudge, as a rock, in the cairn of my life,
the weight coats my fragile fleeing thoughts, dulling.
The spinning child teeters to adult whirlwind, still, sloughing stale nudges.
Worlds appear and disappear within the turmoil of...

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Majestic, barren, rock-cropped braes ascend—
Arrayed, green-clad, in heather, gorse, and fern—
As mid-day, misty, dark’ning clouds descend
To cold-embrace each soaring tor and burn.

From heights unseen a torrent cascades free,
Unfettered into deep Ben Nevis’ glen;
Then onwards toward Loch Linnhe and the sea,
Through sodden bog and brackened, stone-strewn...

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Those shrunken grey turrets throw 
Their distraught shadows to the wind;
And in the grey twilight of ancient 
Beinn Chìochan...
Hear you the droning sounds of 
Muted pipes retreating far back and 
Away. 

Albert heaves upon the old grey 
cairn;
When woken from his immortal sleep,
Laments beside the...

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Totems of What If

Can we ever escape
that which we create
but often choose to ignore

Like the mismatched rocks of a cairn
random choice is not an option
complimenting shapes and sizes
make up one's balance
one's direction
one's harmony

Yet some

Aspiring high rise urban dwellers
live a rock steel and glass totem life
stacking...

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The wizard will know everyone I met along the way said.
Okay, I thought, for I am from Kansas and not daft in my head.
I looked for the curtain as I pranced down the yellow brick road.
Instead of Toto a cairn terrier, I was followed by...

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Times spent most unwisely, unkindly
are each marked on this journey of ours
with a cairn of regret; small reminders 
strewn by our souls like rancid breadcrumbs, 
untouched, even by the hungriest of birds 
not to stain the past, but to steer the present
and with hope, to...

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