Kenny
Blessed be thy faithfulness...
1
We first saw him
driving home
one night
from the cinema
we passed this
busker who looked
a lot like Kenny Rogers;
he was singing
through his soul
under the shimmering
light of the Mid-
City complex.
I thought to myself
right then he looked
just like a prophet fresh
from the Old Testament.
2
We kept seeing
him again
on various nights
up Courtenay Place;
turned out his real
name was 'John Adams'
though people
called him 'Kenny'.
After a while
he became an icon
of the Wellington
night life
and later I learned
he was a poet too,
could do a mean
rendition of Byron's
'The Destruction of
Sennacherib', good at
Whittier, Wordsworth's
'Daffodils', and
what of his own
early verse? He said
he'd trashed it all
at 27, changed
his ways and
turned to the Lord,
"the greatest
poet of all."
Poem © Mark Pirie 2007, 2011
(From The Search by Mark Pirie, ESAW, 2007). Written in 1994. John later produced a CD of his Christian poetry called Kenny, which he inscribed to me in 2004, "with thanks for being my friend".)