If you have just lost a dog, the Rainbow Bridge may be the first thing a friend sends you, the words a vet clinic tucks into a condolence card, or the poem you find at 2 a.m. when the house is too quiet. There is a reason it has comforted millions of people. It takes the fear that haunts every one of us, are they alone, are they scared, are they waiting for me, and answers it gently. They are safe. They are happy. And yes, they are waiting.
What follows is where the poem actually came from, which turns out to be a better story than most sites bother to tell. After that, five short poems we wrote ourselves, given away with no strings.
The Poem Nobody Could Claim
For most of its life the Rainbow Bridge belonged to no one. It travelled by photocopier and pushpin, and later by forwarded email: taped up in veterinary waiting rooms, folded into sympathy cards, read aloud at back-garden burials by people who had no idea who wrote it and no way of finding out. Most copies carried the same three words at the bottom. Author unknown.
Its reach grew through the 1980s and 1990s, the years when pet loss stopped being a private embarrassment and started being something people were allowed to grieve out loud. Bereavement hotlines opened. Practices began sending condolence notes after a euthanasia. The poem showed up exactly when there was a use for it.
And it spread the way folk texts spread, picking up small mutations at every retelling. Lines were added. Wording drifted. Whole passages appear in some versions and not in others. That is part of why the authorship question stayed tangled for so long: there was no single fixed text to trace back to a single fixed source.
The Claims That Came First
Several names were attached to the poem over the years, in books, in newspaper corrections, in long arguments on early internet forums.
Paul C. Dahm, a grief counselor in Oregon, was widely named as the author. He published a book called Rainbow Bridge in the 1990s, and people close to him said he had written the piece around 1981. William N. Britton also published a book on the legend in the 1990s and was credited by some as the writer. Wallace Sife, who founded the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement, was named in other accounts.
None of it ever settled. No claim came with a manuscript older than the poem's known circulation, and each one had people who believed it completely. What that long argument really shows is how badly readers wanted the poem to have a person behind it. A page that has comforted you tends to feel like it was written by somebody, for somebody.
What the 2023 Research Found
In 2023 the author and art historian Paul Koudounaris published research tracing the poem to Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman then in her eighties. She said she wrote it in 1959, at nineteen, in the days after her dog Major died, on a sheet of paper she never intended to show anyone. According to that research she still had the handwritten original. She had given copies to friends over the years, which is the likeliest route by which an unsigned page began its long drift.
Hers is the most widely accepted attribution today. It should be said plainly that this is an attribution, not a court ruling. What makes it convincing is the surviving document, and the fact that she was not chasing anything by coming forward. She had spent six decades not knowing that the page she wrote as a teenager had gone around the world without her.
Why the Full Poem Is Not Reprinted Here
Nearly every site that ranks for this poem prints the whole thing and offers it as a free download. Ours did too, until recently. That made a kind of sense while everybody believed the text was an orphan with no owner attached.
It makes much less sense now. If Edna Clyne-Rekhy wrote it, then it is a piece of writing by a named author who was alive last year, and it is hers, the way any poem belongs to the person who wrote it. Handing it out for free from a site that sells memorial gifts is not something we are comfortable doing. So here is the line everybody knows, and the line it closes on, and that is as far as we will go.
“Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge. […] Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together.”
Rainbow Bridge, credited to Edna Clyne-Rekhy
The full text is not hard to find, and looking it up costs nothing. What we can hand over outright is writing of our own.
Five Poems for a Dog, Free to Use
These are ours. We wrote them for this page and we are giving them away. Read one at a graveside, print it in a service program, copy it into a card, carve it on a stone, say it out loud in the kitchen to nobody in particular. No permission needed, no fee, no credit required. The only thing we ask is that they are not resold as somebody else's writing.
Each one hangs on a single object, because that is where grief actually turns up: not in the big statements, but in a thing you keep tripping over. Wherever you find our detail, cross it out and put yours in its place. If the ball under your couch was orange, or there was no ball and it was a sock, your version is the better poem.
Two Marks in the Paint
at the height of your front paws,
where you asked to be let out
and then asked to be let back in
about nine seconds later.
I keep meaning to sand them down.
I keep not doing it.
The paint is still in the garage
with the lid on, where I left it in March.
Under the Couch
flat on one side, furred with dust,
still faintly damp in a way
that only your mouth could manage.
I sat down on the floor with it a while.
Then I put it back exactly where it was,
because the day I throw that ball away
is a day I am not having yet.
Four in the Morning
The fridge. The pipes. The stairs settling.
None of them are the tags on your collar
clinking twice as you turned in your bed
and sighed like a man of sixty.
I still wake up for it at four.
I lie there and let the fridge be wrong.
We Go Left Now
since you are not here to insist on right,
past the fence with the loud spaniel,
past the lawn where you once took a whole croissant
off a stranger's picnic blanket
and looked at me like I was the problem.
Sixteen minutes. It used to take forty.
I have started going the long way home.
Nose Height
at exactly the height of your nose,
a foggy comma you renewed on every trip
to the lake, to the vet, to nowhere at all.
The kid at the car wash asks
if I want the inside done today.
I say next time.
I have said next time four times now.
Written by Still Beside Me. Free to print, read aloud, or copy into a card. Please do not resell them as your own.
Is the Rainbow Bridge Only for Dogs?
No. The poem is written for all animals who have been especially close to someone. It is searched for and shared most often after the loss of a dog, which is probably how you found this page, but it belongs just as fully to the cat who claimed the warmest spot in the house, the horse who knew your voice, the rabbit, the bird, the small companion who made a life feel less lonely. If you are grieving a cat, we have a companion page for cats with five different poems on it, and our collection of pet memorial poems has more.
How People Use a Poem After a Dog Dies
Any of these work with the Rainbow Bridge, with one of ours, or with something you write yourself at the kitchen table.
In a sympathy card. When you don't know what to say to someone who has just lost their dog, a poem says it for you. Pair it with one specific memory of that particular dog and the card stops being generic. If you want help finding the words, try our free sympathy message helper.
Framed with a photo. Printed beside a picture, a few lines become a daily point of contact, the kind that reminds you of the love before it reminds you of the loss.
To explain it to a child. The meadow, the running, the reunion: these are images a child can hold on to. Plenty of parents read the Rainbow Bridge aloud as a way of talking about where a dog has gone.
At a farewell or a graveside. Read slowly, a poem gives a small ceremony its shape. It marks the moment as something that mattered.
Make It About Your Dog, Not Every Dog
Here is the honest limit of even the most beloved poem. The Rainbow Bridge was written for everyone, which means it was written for no one in particular. It does not mention the way your dog leaned his whole weight against you for a hug, or the ridiculous fire hydrant inspection on every single walk, or the noise he made when he heard your car in the driveway. Those specific things are what made him yours.
That is why so many people pair a borrowed poem with something personal. Our pet memorial poem generator is free, and it works from the real details you give it: the chair, the habit, the ridiculous thing he did every morning. Keep the result alongside the Rainbow Bridge if you like. One tells you he is at peace. The other tells the world who he was.
Rainbow Bridge Poem: Common Questions
Who wrote the Rainbow Bridge poem?
For decades it circulated anonymously and several people were credited with it, among them Paul C. Dahm, William N. Britton and Wallace Sife. Research published in 2023 by the author Paul Koudounaris identified Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman who said she wrote it in 1959 at nineteen, after her dog Major died, and who still had her handwritten original. That is the most widely accepted attribution today.
Is the Rainbow Bridge poem in the public domain?
Probably not. Public domain generally applies to writing old enough for copyright to have lapsed, and a 1959 poem is not that old. Because the piece is credited to a named author who was living in 2023, the safe assumption is that it still belongs to her. That is why this page quotes a line rather than reprinting the whole poem.
Is the Rainbow Bridge poem only for dogs?
No. It is written for any animal who has been especially close to someone. It is searched for and shared most often after the loss of a dog, but it fits cats, rabbits, horses and any other companion just as well.
Can I print a free poem for my dog's memorial?
Yes. The five poems on this page were written by Still Beside Me and are free to print, read aloud, or copy into a card or a service program, with no sign-up and no fee. We do not offer the Rainbow Bridge itself as a printable, because it is credited to a named author and is not ours to give away.
What does the Rainbow Bridge poem mean?
It imagines a meadow at the edge of heaven where pets who have died are restored to health and happiness. They run and play, missing only the person they left behind, and they wait there until that person arrives so the two can go on together. It answers the fear every grieving owner feels: is my dog safe, happy, and waiting for me?