Thank you.
Neil Diamente.
When I heard about Steve, I was here in the library.
It was the day after he died.
And Wendy, I believe, had put together
a quick tribute, a memorial which
was there for a long time, of all his books.
And I started to flip through them.
And I was struck by some of the language.
And I just started to put them together
in that way of using his words to honor him.
So this is called, "The Great Wheel Turns."
And it has this little epigraph it may be Edith Piaf.
It's in a poem of in his last book
and says, "I do not regret anything
at all, either the good that has been done to me or the evil.
Everything is equal to me."
"Cigarette ash fills the urn outside the English office,
where he sat and wrote almost every day,
no matter whether the lines of light fell into place or not.
He knew if we could look, only look further,
we could see through to the other side.
He knew we live in the heart of each hour,
making refusals into art.
He was nobody's Jew, a one-man band, the elephant's child,
one of God's mistakes.
He gave us permission to speak about this particular eternity.
He offered a place at the table, where a bridge of sighs
unites us.
He once wrote a poem against ideas, in which he wished
to be punched in the mouth.
How disagreeable he could be, yet how
he fought for the cause of free verse.
The great wheel turns like the heavy polishing machine
of the night, spinning, swish, swish just outside his door,
and the 1,000 and 1,000 threads unraveling.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]