Cook County Circuit Judge Thomas Donnelly shared the poem below at a reception honoring retired Justice Mary Jane Theis on February 10.
Hello, my friend
Brilliant in insight, passionate in speech genuine in friendship
Fierce ally of judicial education, enamored of the law, lover of the rising star;
Like her beloved Caravaggio: an eye for the real, the human, the grime, the grit.
Princess Wendt on the train to Springfield, defender at 2600 South, 42 years sitting for us. With the Jesuits by the lake and by the bay, she’s cura personalis personified.
Worshipping at amid the byzantine mosaics Deming and Orchard, or the flying buttresses on the Île de la Cité
Glass of white wine perched on her hand at Jim Flannery’s Westin parties, gazing at deer grazing in Michigan during the pandemic, realizer of dreams, mother of a college, reordering the court, defending the defenders.
Always on pilgrimage, never a mere tourist, at the Shelbourne’s Horseshoe Bar in Dublin with the Moore’s and Cullertons, chatting for hours with the lawyer who defended civil rights in India’s Emergency, Ram Jethmalani, soon to be floating by barge with John Theis on the Nile, she always discovers the people not merely the places.
Hello my friend.