(Video link here.) This video features the great natural history documentarian, Sir David Attenborough, reading lines from the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World” as stunning scenes from Attenborough’s documentaries fill the screen. While we watched, we were both delighted and a bit stymied. The video was both beautiful and perspective-broadening, while bordering on being precious and slightly manipulative. It was in fact made by the ad agency RKCR/Y&RH as a tribute to the aging Attenborough and a promo piece for his latest, and possibly last series, Frozen Planet. That explains alot.
As often happens, we held off on posting it until something came along to point it in an unexpected direction. We found it on the strange and beautiful blog Rolu, in a poem by James Broughton. If you mute the video’s corny soundtrack and keep the poem in mind as you watch, you get a WHOLE other experience…
this is it
this is really it
this is all there is.
and it’s perfect as it is.there is nowhere to go
but here.
there is nothing here
but now.
there is nothing now
but this.and this is it.
this is really it
this is all there is.
and it’s perfect as it is.
…an inadvertent mashup…
Related posts: the magic of guerilla poetry (become a poetry bomber)
poems as gifts: don wentworth’s ‘past all traps’
‘lines written in the days of growing darkness’ (mary oliver)
