Passing Through Albuquerque Poem by John Balaban

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch gurgling past backyards near the highway, locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress strolls the levee by the muddy water where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot. Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm, rocking the immense trees and whipping up clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing 'The Mississippi Sawyer' inside a shack. Moments like that, you can love this country.