Poetry Allen Curnow - House and Land?

# House and Land?

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What is the price of a house?

This: it is a place set between the rocks

or by a river, a place built on

by those who went before:

the man with his axe, the woman

with her garden, they put their sweat

into it, made it fit;

that place in the world.

If you sell the house, you sell

the sweat as well as the bricks,

the view as well as the lawn;

you cannot sell just the house.

And who will buy it?

Someone else to live in,

to make improvements, to die?

But will he love the place as much

as the men who sweated it

into existence, who laid the land about

like poetry or a prayer.

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