Lynne Stewart, Our Lady Mandela
POETRY FORMAT, 23 Dec 2013
Gary Corseri – TRANSCEND Media Service
She is ten feet tall… and dying in her cage.
While Obama and Cameron take “selfies,”
shedding crocodile tears,
our Lady Mandela gazes over
the path she has made by her walking.
After his funeral, American drones
kill fifteen people in Yemen.
(Where in the world is Yemen?)
American shoppers rampage, and trample
those in the aisles of their trinkets.
She said she believed “directed violence”
(just as Mandela had said)
would topple the anarchist State
(engorged by its own helter-skelter
in the best tradition of Manson).
In New York City or Yemen,
with drones or tasers or wars,
the Manifold State is watching,
its “laws” abated by judges,
conducting kangaroo courts.
“Who will judge the judges?”
Juvenal wrote about Rome,
which crucified a preacher
for driving money-changers
out of the House of God.
They slashed his back with lashes,
collapsed his lungs on a crossbow,
then shot him into the sky—
for mourning or redemption,
depending on one’s view.
Now It imposes its laws
on a woman wedded to Law,
who fought for the truth of the Law,
to publish it like Luther,
on pain of execrations.
On pain of separation
from family, home, and her Cause.
Even a sentence of cancer
cannot deter her Cause.
She can never betray her Cause.
Over the matricide planet
her thoughts take billowing wing:
the State’s cells metastasize
in every corporate prison,
in every farmed-out heart.
Miley Cyrus twerks her ass
in the face of the hubbubbed mob.
Annointed pundits feign disdain,
then tweet pictures…, but none
of Lynne alone in her cage.
The “people” scurry like ants,
monitored and surveiled, liable,
without notice, to be snuffed;
emulsified like organic dirt
under the heels of the State—
above the Law, acting in the name of Law,
sanctioning crime and murder,
in the name of marmoreal memes:
“We the People” in “the home of the brave,”
“created equal” in “the land of the free.”
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Dr. Gary Corseri has published novels, books of poetry and a literary anthology (editor); his dramas have been performed on PBS-Atlanta, and he has read his poems at the Carter Presidential Center. He has taught in prisons, public schools and universities and his articles, fiction and poems have appeared worldwide at hundreds of websites and periodicals, including, Countercurrents, Village Voice, The New York Times, and Redbook Magazine. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net.
Lynne Stewart (born October 8, 1939) is a former attorney who was known for representing controversial, poor, and often unpopular defendants. She was convicted on charges of conspiracy… and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Her… conviction led to her being… disbarred. … She was re-sentenced on July 15, 2010, to 10 years in prison in light of her alleged perjury at her trial. She is currently serving her sentence at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, a federal prison near Fort Worth, Texas.” Note-Update: Her breast cancer has metastasized, and her doctors predict she has about 1 year to live. Her requests for a “mercy” release have been repeatedly denied, despite some 40,000 signatures on a petition for such a release.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Dec 2013.
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