The Doll Museum
The stone dolls, found in an Egyptian tomb,
are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child
to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room
my sister and I shared, their bodies light
and made for being bent, their eyelids mobile,
hair that tangled with our own. "At night,"
our father winked at us, "they come to life."
We never pressed our cheeks against cold stone
as pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife
could not have caught my sister more off-guard
or left me less alone; I had my dolls.
Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard
with price tags. Even then they looked alive,
survivors with no sickness to survive.
are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child
to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room
my sister and I shared, their bodies light
and made for being bent, their eyelids mobile,
hair that tangled with our own. "At night,"
our father winked at us, "they come to life."
We never pressed our cheeks against cold stone
as pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife
could not have caught my sister more off-guard
or left me less alone; I had my dolls.
Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard
with price tags. Even then they looked alive,
survivors with no sickness to survive.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Caitlin Doyle, "The Doll Museum," from The Warwick Review, (Vol. III, no. 2, 2009). Poem reprinted by permission of Caitlin Doyle and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.