This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You - Page 36

a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells.

A smell of pure energy.

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Your father claimed this ground

would grow five-pound notes

if you planted a shilling.

That I would like to see.

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Flatness | straight lines | a manmade geometry.

The sound of metal on soil // the sky above

This is the landscape you I we grew up in.

This is the landscape which grew us which made us.

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The sea wants to be here. we shouldn’t be surprised when

will give to that

Our engineering gives way before the sea’s desire.

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You didn’t say that. That’s not what you said

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to name these places

The words we’ve been given by our ancestors have no poetry.

Our waterways are called drains,

not rivers or streams or brooks or burns:

Thirty Foot Drain

Sixteen Foot Drain

(and the closest to grandeur, this) Hundred Foot Drain

our farms named for anonymity: Lower Field Farm

Middle Field Farm

Sixteen Foot Farm

People don’t come here because they’ve been

Tags: Jon McGregor Fiction
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