“Lost” for the Weekly Prompts Challenge

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Lost

Lost my dolly, don’t know where.
She’s got no clothes and got no hair.
She’s somewhere out there lost and bare,
thinking that I do not care.
I’d go out looking, but don’t dare.

That babysitter over there
(My mother calls her our au pair)
came by foot and ship and air
from a country named Zaire
to sit here on her derriere
and watch me with her icy stare.

I open up our Frigidaire. 
Could my dolly be in there?
I climb up on a bedroom chair
and go through Mommy’s underwear.
I do not think that she would care.
I find my brother’s whistle there,
hidden in that lacy lair,
and think it really isn’t fair.
It’s every mother’s cruel nightmare.
My dolly isn’t anywhere!

 

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I had to stop the car to take this photo. I wish I knew the true story behind it. I can’t imagine any little girl throwing out her doll, and the lot was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Someone must have tossed it in there. A mean boy? A jealous brother? Was it unwanted loot from a burglary? My mom and I once rode all the way back out to the dump from town to retrieve a doll’s head we’d thrown away. All the way home, we’d both been thinking about it, sitting there amidst coffee grounds and broken light bulbs. We had pulled into the garage when my mom turned to look at me and said, “Do you want to go back out and get that doll’s head?” I nodded. We did, and I have that head to this very day. If my mom had been with me, one or the other of us would have gotten through that barbed wire somehow. As it is, this image is the only part of the doll that I was able to rescue.

 

For the Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge: Lost (I’m rerunning this poem written long ago because it fits the prompt so well.)

19 thoughts on ““Lost” for the Weekly Prompts Challenge”

  2. SueW's avatarSueW

    I love your poem, Judy. Strangely, the child in me feels sorry for the discarded doll! 😢 Perhaps I’ve watched Toy Story too many times!
    Thank you for sharing this with our Lost challenge.

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  4. Unknown's avatarSam

    Neat~! Either a baby looking for its “dolly” or the dolly itself. And a poem not only about the Prompt – “lost”, but the prompt itself~! On top of that, I had just finished sending you an email on a similar subject about how your post triggered my thinking, and then find that you wrote about a photo event that triggered yours~!

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  8. anntonyjandc's avataranntonyjandc

    Such a great poem. Excellent rhyme and rhythm. I especially love the following paragraphs about you and your mom going to retrieve that doll’s head. You are a lot like your mom, I imagine.

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Sometimes I look in the mirror and I think it is her! Other times I think it is my sister Betty, although they looked nothing alike. I think I look more like her since I got a very short haircut–by misunderstanding more than by choice.

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  9. Unknown's avatarAnonymous

    Judy Dear, You have done it again, and granted us all, (especially me) at least a glimpse (or more like a flash) of no simple metaphor here, in this broken used-up doll-child to whom I relate, (although not every minute, at least not yet.) Now let’s do lunch, and chat about life and love and survival and thrival, and what comes next, and is it fated? So what do you think? XO g

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      I would love to do lunch with you but your comment is signed “Anonymous.” Is this Glenda? Are you back in town? If so, please call as when I call you I get no response…

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