Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 735

The Doll Museum

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.21.2019

There’s a lot of very wordy poet­ry these days, but here is a poem of only around 120 words in which every choice is nec­es­sary. I recent­ly accept­ed anoth­er poem by Caitlin Doyle, who lives in Ohio, and I said in that intro­duc­tion that her poet­ry is strate­gic,” in that it feels as if the words have been care­ful­ly held back until they are just right for the moment. Here, the speak­er is a young girl for whom every­thing is chang­ing. This poem orig­i­nal­ly appeared in an issue of The War­wick Review and has since been includ­ed in sev­er­al anthologies. 

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.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

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.