Drive

Medley of horses by the motorway
untethered; the field surplus to transport
or agriculture. At this speed the horses look
like Travellers’ horses beside a leftover wood
where smoke rising sketches a caravan.
As we flash by our road draws its own wake,
a joyful anarchy of second growth —
beechy and larchy shoots, scrub, militant bindweed
whose canker lilies, malign and beautiful,
have everything to play and nothing to pay for.
Two magpies land for luck, a third joins them
to squabble across the brains of a struck fox.
Unscrupulous nature reclaims the scar tissue
of the M54; soon we shall see Wales
take charge of the twilight, a swatch of sunset red
filter the cloudburst over Wolverhampton
as our windscreen wipers, moody with time delays,
hypnotise a landscape of special pleading.