Two poems by C. Dale Young

An excerpt from “In Plain Sight” by C. Dale Young, one of two poems appearing in Waxwing:

 

In Plain Sight

Alongside the twisting road to Erice, the cane fields
moved like water, the leaves and stalks bending
and rippling like water under the hand of the wind.

We had never seen sugarcane growing this way
except in the Caribbean; it had to be a mirage, a trick
of the imagination. But it was no trick, the cane

brought to Sicily by the Arabs in the Tenth Century.
Because Europe was sour, because it was addicted
to honey colonized by bacteria and its resulting toxins, […continue reading here]