As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. It all started back in March, when we were a couple of weeks into pandemic lockdown. I first saw the phrase "Spring did not know" around the end of the month, in a rather clunky snippet of a rhyme, on Facebook. I was struck by it then, and it stayed in my head. Then the effects of the pandemic got worse and worse, and in early May my sister Heather died. In the midst of sadness, the poem started to develop in my head, as something talking not just about a pandemic and the way it touches normal lives, but also about loss, and grief, and continuity, and renewal. So in June I played round with some ideas and some word sequences, and at last wrote the poem down, late at night. Since then I have changed hardy a word, because I quite like the idea of spontaneity and rough edges..........
I put the poem onto this blog and onto social media, and the few people that read it seemed to like it -- and then suddenly, with my 80th birthday coming up, I had the idea of asking my son Stephen to narrate and record it for me as a birthday present. We chatted about it, and I wondered about the possibility of setting the narration in the context of some spring / summer /landscape images from my photo collection. We decided against a musical background. Steve kindly helped me to put it onto YouTube on August 1st. The response has been wonderful, and very touching -- almost a thousand viewings in the first week.
So where did the idea come from? As far as I can make it out, it started on March 21st, in Italy, when the Italian poet Irene Vella read out her poem called "A primavera nao sabia", put it together with gentle guitar music and video clips, and placed it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYRYGscAgRc
Somebody then translated it (probably rather badly) into English, and John Amato sent a short version to the Hudson Reporter ( as a Letter to the Editor) which included the phrase "But spring did not know." The heading was "It was March 2020" -- and that became the name of the Engish version which was then published on Facebook -- no doubt in many guises!
https://hudsonreporter.com/2020/03/22/it-was-march-2020/
Later versions included the line “But spring didn’t know anything”…….
Finally a video with music (that old classic called "The Sound of Silence") was created by Ine RP Braat, and it can be seen here under the title "Coronavirus Poem":
http://www.ine-pps.nl/?page=movies&item=coronavirus_poem_it_was_march_2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDVKfWIWRHs
So there we are then. It's strange how a little phrase can stick in the memory and fire the imagination!
https://youtu.be/si-KKcCRZBs
