{"id":89214,"date":"2017-03-27T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=89214"},"modified":"2018-12-20T09:50:11","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T09:50:11","slug":"lynne-stewart-our-lady-mandela-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/03\/lynne-stewart-our-lady-mandela-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Lynne Stewart, Our Lady Mandela"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s note: An earlier version of this poem appeared at various websites in December, 2013.\u00a0 Some notes on Lynne Stewart below\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For Lynne, October 1939-March 2017<\/em><\/p>\n

She is ten feet tall\u2026 and dying in her cage\u2026.<\/p>\n

While Obama and Cameron take \u201cselfies,\u201d
\nshedding crocodile tears
\nat Nelson Mandela\u2019s final farewell,
\nour Lady Mandela gazes over
\nthe path she has made by her walking.<\/p>\n

After the great man\u2019s funeral, American drones
\nkill fifteen people in Yemen.
\n(\u201cWhere in the world is Yemen?\u201d
\nschoolchildren and their parents wonder,
\nwhile American shoppers rampage, and trample
\nthose in the aisles of their trinkets.)<\/p>\n

She said she believed \u201cdirected violence\u201d
\n(just as Mandela had said)
\nwould topple the anarchist State
\n(engorged by its own helter-skelter
\nin the best tradition of Manson).<\/p>\n

In New York City or Yemen,
\nwith drones or tasers or wars,
\nthe Manifold State is watching,
\nits \u201claws\u201d abated by judges,
\nconducting kangaroo courts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho will judge the judges?\u201d
\nJuvenal wrote about Rome,
\nwhich crucified a preacher
\nfor driving money-changers
\nout of the House of God.<\/p>\n

They slashed his back with lashes,
\ncollapsed his lungs on a cross,
\nthen shot him into the sky
\n(for mourning or redemption,
\ndepending on one\u2019s view).<\/p>\n

Now Deep State imposes its laws
\non a woman wedded to Law,
\none who fought for the truth of the Law,
\nto publish it like Luther,
\non pain of execrations:<\/p>\n

Excommunication,
\nand the pain of separation
\nfrom family, home, and her Cause.
\nEven a sentence of cancer
\ncannot deter her Cause.
\nShe can never betray her Cause!<\/p>\n

Over the matricide planet
\nher thoughts take billowing wing:
\nthe State\u2019s cells metastasize
\nin every corporate prison,
\nin every farmed-out heart.<\/p>\n

Miley Cyrus twerks her ass
\nin the face of the hubbubbed mob\u2014
\nin the bubble of our amnesia,
\nforgetting who we were
\nand the dream of what we could be.<\/p>\n

Annointed pundits feign disdain,
\nthen tweet pictures\u2026, but none
\nof Lynne alone in her cage\u2014
\nso far from family and friends,
\nin timeless, infinite space, enclosing
\nher solitary point of light.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpeople\u201d scurry like ants,
\nmonitored and maced, liable,
\nwithout notice, to be snuffed;
\nemulsified like dung
\nunder the heels of the State\u2014
\nabove the Law, acting in the name of Law,
\nsanctioning crime and murder,
\nin the name of marmoreal memes:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe the People\u201d in \u201cthe home of the brave,\u201d
\n\u201ccreated equal\u201d in \u201cthe land of the free.\u201d<\/p>\n

*************************
\nFrom Wikipedia<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLynne Stewart (born October 8, 1939) is a former attorney who was known for representing controversial, poor, and often unpopular defendants.\u00a0 She was convicted on charges of conspiracy\u2026and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Her\u2026conviction led to her being\u2026disbarred.\u2026 She was re-sentenced on July 15, 2010, to 10 years in prison in light of her alleged perjury at her trial.\u201d\u00a0 Update: Her breast cancer has metastasized, and her doctors predict she has about 1 year to live.\u00a0 Her requests for a \u201cmercy\u201d release have been repeatedly denied, despite some 40,000 signatures on a petition for such a release.\u201d<\/p>\n

*************************<\/p>\n

From the Democracy Now!<\/em> Website (March 8, 2017):<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cRadical civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart died Tuesday at her home in Brooklyn from complications of cancer and a recent series of strokes. She was 77 years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cA former teacher and librarian, Stewart was known as a people\u2019s lawyer\u2026. Many considered her a political prisoner herself when she was given a 10-year sentence for distributing press releases on behalf of one of her clients, Omar Abdel-Rahman\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2010, Stewart was re-sentenced to a 10-year term, nearly five times her original sentence, after an appeals court ruled her original punishment was too light.<\/p>\n

\u201cAttorney Leonard Weinglass said Stewart\u2019s sentence would “mark this era as the era of the war on terrorists, which includes the war on lawyers who defend those who are accused of terrorism. To put her behind bars when no one was injured, no one was harmed, when those who produced the torture memos, those who produced the war are going free and even prospering is really the irony of our time.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile held in federal prison for nearly four years, Stewart suffered from stage IV breast cancer that metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs. She was given 18 months to live.<\/p>\n

\u201cCalls to grant her compassionate release came at a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons faced increasing criticism for refusing to release terminally ill prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Dr. Gary Steven Corseri is a m<\/em>ember of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/a> He<\/em> has published and posted articles, fiction and poems at hundreds of venues, including,<\/em> TMS (Transcend Media Service<\/a>)<\/a>, The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine and<\/em> Counterpunch.\u00a0 He has published 2 novels and 2 collections of poetry, and his dramas have been produced on<\/em> PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere.\u00a0 He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum and has taught in universities in the US and Japan, and in US public schools and prisons.\u00a0 Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s note: An earlier version of this poem appeared at various websites in December, 2013. Some notes on Lynne Stewart below\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-format"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}