To Julian Assange on his 50th Birthday

Happy birthday to free speech’s hero,

Our Solzhenitsyn and our Sakharov,

As you sit in your isolation cell

Where they destroy your life minute by minute,

Depriving you of sleep, tortured by cold,

Depriving you of any communication

So you cannot reveal more of their crimes,

Oh you, new Prisoner of Chillon, like the old

Locked in a dungeon for the crime of speaking

Truth to tyranny, which masquerades

Obscenely as democracy, while the “free press”

Ignores, despises or condemns your struggle,

And the judges flout the laws of their own country,

You will remain forever the greatest proof

That we are ruled by evil. Your example

Will prove not merely the eternal courage

Of the individual, but the eternal cowardice

Of those who rule every state in the Empire

Of Evil, the American global tyranny,

The new Nazism, the new USSR,

The new feudal world order. Happy birthday,

From those who, deprived of means of communication,

Send you our thoughts of gratitude and love

For what you have sacrificed to set us free.

Michael Antony