I've Looked Through Every Part Of The Castle, The Princess Sighed Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

to Carl Sandburg, Walter De La Mare, Charles Dickens, and Christopher Morley*

I've looked through every part of the castle,

the princess sighed,

for the storybook I left behind.

the one that rustled like the leaves whenever it rained.

the one where the sun melted, butter-fresh, on every page


churning gold to gold untold.whenever you read

to yourself, alone…


I'm telling it my way dear she said to her younger sister.

oh Alicia be good and keep the magic fishbone close at hand


for the future you can't see yet,

whispered the illuminations.


dressed in peach silk sunbursts godmother arrives

at the exact moment you are disheartened

and the sun dress with pockets turns to


starlight over the prairies;

the dish of raspberries smiles through the cream.

drink it all up! there's the family crest.

what is a family crest? the baby wondered,

staring at the china

botton of the bowl-

wanting more, but not yet saying specifically:

storybooks…cocoa and animal crackers or fleur -fleur di lis!

(how could she?)


at the brink, there's the queen

sewing sensibly by a green window

or is it that the green comes all indoors

whenever you start to murmur about the waterfall

you tamed in the living room last summer

when the music came through

and we were done with board games and dancing?


it's so refreshingly refreshing why did they leave

musedthe dog with the silver paws

in charge of rumination and the butternut shadows.


there's the lemonade springs, the bluebirds scattered

throughout oh please

stay on that page my sister whispered, where the candy

canes grow on trees

or the clouds turn to cream puffs over the village and the

stewpot keeps on (turn the page, the fairies chimed)

bubbling all winter long, even when we can't find work;

indeed, dear God we find other things.


mary angela douglas 16,17 april 2013

*respectively: for that story about cream puffs,for the poem

called Silver, for Alicia and the Magic Fishbone, (and

her brothers and sisters) , for Christopher Morley for his

poem about a favorite childhood snack.