Crushed by a wheel
Our sweetest flower has been crushed in the dust of Rafah,
on the West Bank,
trampled beneath the heels of a steel wheel.
Her blood is a broken blossom blowing on the wind of anger keening through the world.
She stands tapping at the window of every home,
her voice a guilty verdict on machine-made death,
her name a synonym for love triumphant,
her eyes a vision of hope seen in the darkest midnight of today,
her memory a reminder that death may not triumph,
must not triumph.
Oh, you leader of women,
you bell-wether of a brighter future for all the world's oppressed,
you breath of God inspiring all those chained in torment
in the seventh deep of deepest hell,
your name shall never die.
How shall we remember you?
Not with cold marble
nor the wailing walls of mourning.
Not with the empty words of my broken song.
Not with the tears of the victimed and disempowered.
Your life empowers all who sing your name.
It is scrawled upon the bombed bunker of the Al Ameriya shelter,
etched in the bloody shadows of those burnt to death in that place.
It is the dying breath of the Colombian campesino,
laughing in the face of the cruel mockery of the death-squad torturers.
It is the song of the oud ringing back to a time when life erupted out of Bethlehem and Medina,
and the dark ages' end in the renaissance of surrender to the reality of a world founded on a compass-arc,
the mandolin calligraphy of a woman ululating into the night,
the deep cry of whale to far-swum whale,
music of spheres revolving, globe on orbiting globe,
flinging pathways the stars and comets know.
Oh Rachel, our love, our delight, our truest floret on the rising greenspring of tomorrow's life,
your murderers sought to silence your voice,
even as they dung up the open mouths of children born to die in the ruins of Baghdad and Basra.
But they cannot kill it.
Your death lives in our hearts like a scarlet dagger pointing towards the dawn,
a planted seed that sprouts like dragons' teeth,
armed with love and joy,
not hatred or death.
Our sweetest flower cannot be crushed,
for even as the steel wheel rolls on,
see, how even in the tracks of the behemoth rolling over her,
the bright petals flutter like a butterfly escaping the cocoon of tomorrow's new harvesting,
the birthing that grows out of even death,
which only the light of her life can penetrate.
We will always remember her name,
but the name and race of her murderer has already been forgotten.
21/3/03 14:42, on flight RJ111 from Amman to London Heathrow, on the first day of the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq
For Rachel Corrie, crushed beneath an American bulldozer, driven by an Israeli soldier in Rafah, occupied Palestine, on Wednesday March 12, 2003
