Hymn To The Drivers by Michael Symmons Roberts

Every second a child is born, a car is made;
knitted together in factory towns
by robot arms with sparks at their fingertips.
The cars wait, possessed but never owned,
left out in the rain, driven hard.

And the children wait for them, a-stagger
on their slow pins, they watch the elders
slide by behind tinted windscreens, lips
in time with the radio. Deliverance comes
as a set of keys and a card in your name.

Even at night, car power is palpable.
Under linden trees they rest on haunches,
colour indeterminate in sodium light.
Think of them as coiled, not cataleptic,
and the road as open, wet with lime leaves.


---
from Drysalter