Excerpts from
Let me Stand Alone by Rachel Corrie:
"If the words I use buzz away from my lips meaninglessly, then we'll let them hang in the air for a while. We'll let those silly words sit and make fools of themselves until other words come and crowd around them.
I need to flutter and hover and look at the diamond ripples through six swirled insect eyes. Just don't touch me for a moment. Let me sit and stare at everything through my own eyes for a while. Let me dance in the lily petals and skim the trembling water and buzz like useless words in the air.
Do you understand? Let me lie alone on my back in tall grass and see the sun and the water droplets on the branches and the red tree trunks through my own eyes. Let me color them and build them with my own words. Lonely, strong words. Let em stand alone at the edge of the earth and look at it honestly, alone."
1995-1997
"My face is lovely in the reflection in the windows. Smooth white moonlight stretches over the cheekbones in jagged lines and my eyes look almost black, except for the cold light of the passing stars. I angle my face up to the glass and they sky and watch my lips form the lyrics of songs on the radio.
The air that breeches the wide flat fields of Montana is cool and empty, so there is a voice for each glowing set of numbers as I flick the dial on the radio. The Djs are confiding this late at night that they know they share loneliness with everyone awake in the darkness. Even so, they aren't out here, cutting the breeze. Watching the stars move by.
Chris is driving. He is awake and alert but completely separate from me. We haven't talked since he bought me a coke on the idaho border. I'm alone with the classic rock songs that churn softly out of the speakers. I skip from harmony to melody, let the notes ricochet off the windowpane.
The singer is awake in me now, the softly voluptuous moon-voice I yearn for in the daytime. I sing loud because no one hears me, yet my voice goes forever above the short gray grass on the fields. My singer only wakes up when I'm alone. She is timid, like a hermit crab emerging, vulnerable, from its borrowed shell.
When I first started singing, she came readily and shamelessly. She was loud and loose and proud. But she was good enough to get the attention of my teacher, and he told me to get a voice teacher. From then on, I learned everything that was wrong with my voice. I memorized how to breathe, how to stand, how wide to open my eyes, and how to shape my mouth. And then, after helping me find all the faults in my voice, my teacher wondered why I acted wooden, and where my confidence had gone. I wish I had remained wild and terrible and free, because then I was unafraid."
-August 1992
[reminiscent of Pablo Neruda]
"Ode to the Drip of a Faucet" 1989-1990
Of the
translucent
sphere, a gem.
Let loose, after a gather of slowing power.
A drop of silver dew
or a tiny tear on a child's cheek.
Maybe, rain on a window.
Is it a witch's crystal ball?
All the possibilities of a tiny bit of water,
plummeting to the drain."
May 19, 1993
"Death smells like homemade applesauce as it cooks on the stove. (her grandmother's death) It is not the strangling scent of illness. It is not fear. It is freedom. Death is warmth as it melts into refreshing coldness. Death has friendly hands that gently guide you. They are calm and they do not push. Death is a long walk through a mountain meadow and somehow your steps seems to carry you down through the mountains and into the gentle swells of ocean. As carelessly as before, you walk down into the depths of the water. The fins of fish stroke your face."
"Dear Mom,
Some might think in this day and age a girl's role model should be a career woman, someone working in an office or in a so-called "men's" linke of work. I know theose people are wrong. For me, you are the perfect role model. I admire how you take things you want to do, like playing your flute and writing music, and find ways to fit them into your life. I admire your ability to clearly say what you think and feel. If every woman were that assertive, there would be more respect for the women of this world. I admire your kindness. you are the only person I know whom I've never seen hurt another to get something you want. I believe you can get whatever you want without hurting anyone. What I admire most is not what you have done for yourself, but what you have done for me. I hope when I grow up, I can pass on to my children what I have learned from you about how to treat people. You have given me a wonderful life and shown me how to get that sort of life for myself.
People might think my mom not a hero because she hasn't done anything "exceptional." Well, you don't have to do anything exceptional. I know that you
are exceptional. you have made me proud of you by working hard at everything you do and doing it well.
I love you, Mom.
Sincerely,
Rachel"
1989 The Forty Thousand
"I'm here for other children.
I'm here because I care.
I'm here because children everywhere are suffering
and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.
I'm here because those people are mostly children.
We have got to understand that the poor are all around us
and we are ignoring them.
We have to to understand that these deaths are preventable.
We have to to understand that people in third world countries
think and care and smile and cry just like us.
We have got to understand that they dream our dreams
and we dream theirs.
We hve got to understand they they are us. we are them.
my dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.
My dream is to give the poor a chance.
My dream is to save the forty thousand people who die each day.
My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future
and see the light that shines there.
If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.
If we all help and work together,
it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow."
[Rachel was 10 yrs-old when she wrote this poem.]
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