Only joking! As if.... Well now, Deja Vu. What an appropriate theme during this extended period of semi-lockdown and social distancing. However, believe it or not these topics were all chosen way back in December before we had even the merest hint of what was coming our way in 2020! Them's the breaks - and next week (spoiler alert) it's 'Silence'. Hold the excitement.
I get the impression that since the prescriptive curbs on our activities were brought in nearly three weeks ago, millions of us are doing pretty much the same thing day after day with only the subtlest of variations - that goes for everybody from key workers to home workers to the self-isolating. Get up, do A then B then C then D then sleep and repeat. Some of us, if we're lucky, have more than one room to do it in.
Occasionally I feel sorry for people without internet capability. They haven't had The Marvellous Mrs Maisel (series 1,2,3) to keep them amused - but then I also think they're not really missing what they never had and perhaps being off-grid is the sanest way with so much fake news and sheer trivia bouncing around the bandwidth.
A room with a view of a room with a view of a room with a view et cetera...
One item that attracted my attention, because it's a poem that has been posted and shared repeatedly on Facebook in recent days, is the 'Pandemic' poem that goes:And the people stayed home
And read books and listened
And rested and exercised
And made art and played games
And learned new ways of being
And were still and listened more deeply... etc
which I've seen being described as a poem dating from an earlier pandemic (Spanish flu, 1918-20), written by the Irish poet Kathleen O'Meara, the striking feature being its powerful sense of deja vu.
The fact that O'Meara died in 1888 (thirty years before Spanish flu) ought to set alarm bells ringing! The work in fact appears to belong to a retired American teacher - also called Kitty O' Meara - but it was written just a couple of weeks ago. Thanks, fake news! That's deja vu out the window then...
except that the American lady's poem bears an interesting similarity to one written just weeks earlier at the beginning of March by an Italian writer, Irene Vella. Vella's poem is far more detailed and there is a suggestion that O'Meara may have translated and plagiarised a précis of the Italian's original. I've no idea. If one is being charitable, one may say that it's just a curious but not necessarily surprising coincidence, that the impact of Covid-19 has somehow evoked strikingly similar poetic creations from multiple pens on different continents - almost like a universal response.
One thing you can be sure of is that there is no plagiarism involved in my latest. It's totally unrelated to theme and I did Covid-19 last week, This therefore is just a piece of Easter Saturday silliness. In my own mind, I rank all my poems - League One, League Two, Three, Four if you wish - and this is definitely League Four...but maybe hoping to make the play-offs. Like I said, it's just a bit of fun - and we could all do with some of that right now.
Press Conference
Hard upon his sensational return from elsewhere,
when asked if he had any impressions to share
from those long years of intrepid traversal,
the explorer answered reporters thus:
"If there's one abiding lesson I've learned
from my sojourn among the Litotes,
(a most self-deprecating race, by the by)
it's the importance of doing your own irony."
Bemusement reigned. The odd flash-bulb popped,
short-hand was scrawled and brows furrowed
as the assembled corps trawled their pun stores
in search of a leader to caption their copy.
The best of the crop, before it became chip wrap,
simply read, dead pan: Homecoming falls flat.
Thanks for reading. Stay isolate, S;-) Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
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