Dancing Dust
	Poems by Mollie Caird (1922-2000)
	In memoriam R.J.T.B.
Home Alphabetic index of poems Thematic index of poems Biography Gallery Contact and links	The year you were twenty-one an eagle, weary Of brooding thin-shelled infertile eggs, sailed down Into Glen Tanar and built a frustration eyrie (So the forester called it) in a pine's battered crown. We watched her restlessly preening, a victim of change, Of technology's poisons.  I gathered a huge moult-feather And keep it still, a memorial of that strange Between-worlds summer when you and your friends were together. Does that golden bird still live, and yet unfulfilled? I have never returned, and only the forester knows; Frail nets ― a feather, a sonnet ― hold memory fast. Young, you saw visions, you mounted with wings, you distilled Your hopes to a dangerous elixir, so building at last Your frustration eyrie in the high alpine snows. Robert Bruce, a young man of brilliance and promise, was a close family friend who was killed in a climbing accident in the Alps in 1979. 1980 The Dancing Dust and other poems, 1983