Nothing marks the car quarry now,
just raised earth like the hummock of a grave,
a headstone of trees, wind-written epitaphs
running in their leaves.
Filled in years ago,
but still I can't help standing at its edge,
where the ground once gave
to an elephant's graveyard of cars,
a motorway pile-up in the corner of the field.

One of the places we came
when we had tired of catching
the commas and apostrophes
of minnows and bullheads;
or shooting at pumpkins in the field,
shouldering the kick of your father's shotgun;
or playing at war in the barn,
dying again and again
under its gap-toothed roof and broken beams.

A place where we tested our voices,
young as the buzzards above us
striking their cries against a flint sky,
smashed black holes in the windows,
sat in the drivers' seats, going nowhere,
operated on engines,
dock-leaves and nettles running in their pistons
or just walked among them,
reading aloud from the names of the dead:
Volvo, Ford, Vauxhall,
Their primary colours rusting to red.
Where we lost ourselves in the hours before dark,
year on year, until that day
when life put on the brakes
and pitched you, without notice,
through the windscreen of your youth.
Your father found at dawn —
a poppy sown in the unripe corn.

I came back once, to find the cars smaller
or the undergrowth grown,
whichever, the whole diminished to steel and stone.
Just cars in a quarry,
their dashboards undone and the needles
of the speedos settled at zero.
As I climbed back out I disturbed a buzzard
that flew from its branch like a rag
shaken out in the wind,

before spiralling upwards
above the shuffling trees
and on over the fields —
the spittle sheep, the ink-dot cows,
a tractor writing with its wheels,
and on over the lanes, where a boy
meandered between the hedges,
trailing a stick, kicking a stone,
trying once more to find his way home.