If you knew Corrie, you understood the joy of life.
You understood why you could never keep a straight face. When she walked into a room and burst out laughing, you could not contain it. On your worst days when you held on to something that hits us as adults, she had a way of tossing it in a pan. Your worries melted in the sizzle of the pan.
I hope you will celebrate and laugh with me now in the spirit of Corrie as my poem “If I Call You Juliet” has been published by “The Walled City Journal.”
“The Walled City Journal” is a beautiful new online journal in Lahore, Pakistan with wonderfully diverse writing and young adults who share their goals on the About Page I hyperlinked at the beginning of the sentence.
(I can no longer consider myself a part of that category.)
“If I Call You Juliet” is the fourth poem accepted for publication this year, and the first published in “The Walled City Journal.” I’ve never shared any part of this Corrie poem online or with anyone prior to its publication. It is my personal favorite and dearest of the Corrie poems.
This poem is the closing poem in my collection When We Danced In The Rain, which I’ve submitted to different places and contests for publication in its entirety. “If I Call You Juliet” is the first of two poems from this collection to appear in publication.
I’m so honored that this poem is published in an international journal as it hopefully shows Corrie’s journey and the love of any child breaks through all boundaries of culture, gender, and religion.
I would share a sample here, but it is a poem you cannot break up in any portion. It is Corrie in every essence in that respect.
As you look on the left side of the screen when you first open the journal, you’ll read the words “violet blue corolla wrap.” The editors did a beautiful job sharing words from each piece of work published here, and those are from “If I Call You Juliet.”
When you open the link, you click my author’s name, Rebecca T. Dickinson, to read “If I Call You Juliet.”
The poem was inspired by three events. Corrie often sat at my side during E Learning to make crafts from my English I students’ choice board for Romeo and Juliet before we read. I spoke with my students of the Nurse’s loss of her own daughter as a baby, and I explained how we almost lost Corrie as an infant. This was just before her sudden death. Then I wanted to write something in the traditional way of a boyfriend to a girlfriend only the love is something far greater.
It is the love for my daughter.
Corrie's Season 