Best Tombstone Poems

Each day in Tombstone as tourists watch
The OK Corral gunfight plays out
Reenactments staged by the locals
The Earps always prevail in this bout

Saunter down to the Bird Cage Theater
Now a museum in this Old West town
Actors aren’t needed to play roles
The original cast is still around

Sixteen...

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Here lies a women dead before her time
Struck down by guided arrows dipped in rhyme
A wound that first was sweet but turned to vile 
It slowly sapped her strength and stole her smile

The words all worked their way down to her heart
Like chamber maids, each...

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I took a casual stroll through the local cemetery the other day,
Looking for interesting epitaphs and to pay my respects along the way.
Many stones were simply etched with names and dates of death and birth.
Others contained tales of sad demise, yet others of perky mirth.

"Here...

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(For Ryland Matthews' My Darkest Hour Contest)

Blank Tombstone
by Audonus Taylor


A blank tombstone
rests above deceased me,
As I dream of a future
far as any being can see,
No flower arrangements,
Not a rose seals my tomb,
No inscription of immortality
No "loving father" or "beloved groom",

Does such lack of bereavement
reflect me...

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Through graveyard
meandering, just
me and Dad
stories sad
abbreviated down to
mostly names and dates

So we tell
their stories by turns
like poor Duane
Dinwiddie
died at age thirty-three of
bee sting allergy

So tragic
how she caught a chill
Angeline
age nineteen
who died before her wedding
day, her groom grieves still

Or the war
heroes, Frank and Finn
taken in
the prime...

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One of the best inscriptions, ”I Told You I Was Sick”
Another was “I Was Hoping For A Pyramid” I pooped a brick
Even in death humor lasts
When the die has been cast
“Once I wasn't, then I was, now I ain't again”, that one clicked...

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I came here with flowers
held gently to my sobbing chest,
to bring them to my dearest;
I have departed from the living,
to come face to face with my ending...

I lay my flowers at this cold tombstone...
engraved with a name too sweet,
and yet so painful to call it...

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Whistle does the lone desert winds, flowing downwards from
Boot hill cemetery, in icy chilling breeze full of echoing voices,
From the past, begging for redemptions last chance of salvation.
Roll does the crimson tumbleweed, towards the ghost town known as
Tombstone, a monuments graveyard to the old west.
In...

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they walked along
weathered, carrying their guns;
like the four horsemen…

down to the O.K.
guns blazing, bullets flying;
smoke clears, the strong stand…...

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Lived amongst the dead
Then decided to join them...

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It was simply an old rusty tractor
An eyesore for passers by
A graveyard, at the back, of a pasture
All covered with weeds and vines
Curiously, on slow approach, 
I wanted a closer look
Carefully climbed the barbed wire fence
Hopping over a weed wild brook
What once had been paint...

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Take my heart to Tombstone,
Away from hill and tree,
Sell my horse to injuns
But give the saddle free

Outside haunts a spectre,
He has his eye on me, so 
Take my heart to Tombstone,
And hang it from a tree

Blood and friendship’s now
Long gone, only rivers run 
True free,...

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Learning to distinguish between and having a compassion for-silence that protects pain and silence that protects injustice has been a difficult important lesson-Julie Buckner Armstrong
                    ...

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humid trail of life
over dry words and numbers -
snail on a tombstone


11/20/2019	
A Nature Themed Haiku Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Tania Kitchin
Syllables Per Line:	5 7 5...

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So no more shall his traitors hate;
For death's veils have made it late
To slight any soul time has called
To dine and wine in the city of gold.

And his tombstone does eerily stand
Above the grass on the watered land;
Where passers-by might donate a tear
To lament the...

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