Red Car

Total Feckin' Eejit's having a party, and in honour of the event I've dragged Pure Fiction out of retirement, but this time it's purely for the poetry.
The party's in honour of Nuala Ní Conchuir's latest poetry collection, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car. I love her blog and I've been dying to hop on TFE's poetry bus ever since it started out, but before I managed to leap aboard, it crashed. So this time I'm grabbing the chance before the bus gets too full, then I'm heading over to TFE's for what sounds like the party of a life-time.

Driving

The road is not red,
exactly, more of a pink.
‘It’s the sandstone that makes
it that colour,’ one of them says,
but that is not something
you need to know, when you’re
six-years-old and you’re sitting
in the car with your knees
pulled up under your coat.

And your eyes are pinned
on the hill ahead
and the road is pulling you
forward, onwards,
eating you up, eating up
the time this drive will take,
when the three of you,
just you three,
are together.

And everything is pink.
The gently patterned hill.
Your hand on the back of the seat.
Their faces, turning slightly away.