Cairns Along The Wintersteen

 

The path hardly there,

signposted, though, with piles of stone

gravely marking the slow demise of trail,

 

each stone, a word (each word

a stone), the Wintersteen’s expiring

life all gathered up into its cairns,

 

each cairn

a world, each heap like any other

but like the stones, every one an other.

 

Monuments like this

wayfarers seldom leave behind,

at most a can, a heap of orange peel

 

but those who place the stones

choose memory, and he who laid

this stone may lie, himself, beneath another,

 

some humble mound

of stoneÑmemorial enough

for him, memorial enough for me.

 

Touchstones, earthbones, tombstones

homunculus or tumulus

humble or tumbled, cairns of Wintersteen,

 

Shiva stones of India

herms of ancient Greece

pebbles on the Jewish tombs in Prague.

 

I feel our commonality

we who walk the Wintersteen

who find the cairns and stay a while

 

to ponder those

who came before, and know a culture,

that cairn to which we each must bring a stone.

 

 

Jon Thiem