We three boys
would trawl boggy fields
well up to welly boot depths
and over
to heel and toe squelch home
from draining ditches
of dark unknowns
never measured before
by mankind
those unlit sinkholes
of fervent imaginations
each fed by slowed streams
of red Martian water
that oxide bleeding
so bloody it could be
the earth rusting inside
too much for life
and from that ditch
I lifted a fossil leaf
a tyre track of time
embedded into rock
as if left by God on a bike.