Adaptation

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I must be standing on a hill,
some way from the village.
I can see the vineyards and gardens,
thatched roofs. The stars adrift
in light cloud cover, almost golden
the rolling hills like
a tide about to wash in.
An explosion at the point of perspective,
searing the canvass,
what could have been a tree,
surely a spotlight in the sky,
a fleet of bombers and the hills
the head of a hammer.
Pardon my grammar.
It was a starry, starry night.

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the opening of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett:

A country road. A tree.
Evening.

Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before....

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from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Here the young man fell silent. And Zarathustra contemplated the tree beside which they were standing, and spoke thus:

'This tree stands here alone on the mountainside; it has grown up high above man and animal.

'And if it wished to speak, it would find no one who understood it: so high has it grown.

'Now it waits and waits -- yet what is it waiting for? It lives too near the seat of the clouds: is it waiting, perhaps, for the first lightening?'

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