Everyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one may identify with the first sentence of Olivia Harrison’s poetry collection. She writes, “All I wanted was another spring.” “Did I ask too much?”
The widow of George Harrison, the former Beatle who died of lung cancer at the age of 58 on November 29, 2001, speaks up about her husband in the lyrics that follow this question.
For the past 20 years, I’ve written twenty poems. That’s not a coincidence.
The 74-year-old Harrison’s debut collection, “Came the Lightning,” was released on Tuesday, and it was a pleasant surprise. The couple’s son Dhani has helped her edit George’s work, but otherwise she’s preserved their marriage’s secrecy as they always had.
When she read “A Wounded That Never Heals” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, she was moved to write about her own desire for another spring. After first opting not to make it public, she changed her mind.
“It was because he was a decent man,” she claimed in an interview with the AP. “He’s a kind man. ‘I want others to know… these things,’ I thought to myself. People believe they know George, but he deserves this from me, because so many people think they know him.”