better with his presence

Kevin

Kevin’s wife speaks of the proverb

of the six blind men and the elephant,

each knows a real part, but the whole is elusive,

so is Kevin, who left his life too early,

Kevin was big: in body, in spirit,

in effect on all of us who knew him at all,

as we sit in a circle in memory

of this New Zealander, of this American,

friends and family rise and rise and rise,

to tell stories, jokes, to tell of his impact on them,

I sit near his granddaughter, happy in her car seat,

then in the arms of her mother, her grandmother,

in the joyous fullness of her moments

she echoes the same vibrancy that was in Kevin,

Kevin, the man, is within the circle before us,

though his body had to quit,

while he threw himself into his work,

each speaks of his still living within us,

of no one able to fill his shoes,

but we are charged to fill our own shoes

as well as he filled his,

each speaker brings forth truth,

and the collective wisdom aches to hold the wholeness,

the reality, the wonder, of who Kevin was, and is,

how beautiful that together we get as close as we do

to the reality of the light he released to the world,

how tragic that we only can hold the ephemeral,

for the flesh-and-blood can be no longer be here

to build, to connect, to hoist a few,

to make us all better with his presence.

by Henry H. Walker

September 7, ‘19