In order to view this poem with the line breaks the author intended, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in the landscape orientation on your phone or tablet. Also, we suggest reading this poem aloud, slowly. Then reading it aloud again. Perhaps with a friend.

Crossing Texas
Ellen Roberts Young

Curious as Odysseus in foreign waters,
we leave the curving interstate, drive
all day on a straight road, courthouse to
courthouse. County centers of order, units
small as territories of Hellenic kings,
link sprawling ranches. As earth changes
from desert to muck, Midland yellow
to Dallas black, measured miles declare
a human scale can tame the far horizon.

What holds dry west, damp east together,
a people whose pride is size, distance?
I’m not surprised this broad-shouldered state
hosts the space center, though shuttles
neither land nor lift from here. Would Homer,
whose hero ranged the length of his known
world, have had the hubris to tackle Texas?

—
Ellen Roberts Young’s third chapbook with Finishing Line Press, Transported, came out in 2021. She has two full-length collections, Made and Remade (Wordtech, 2014) and Lost in the Greenwood (Atmosphere, 2020), as well as poems in numerous print and online journals. She lives in Las Cruces, NM (Piro-Manso-Tiwa territory).

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