IN HAVRE MONTANA
Riding the Great Empire Builder sitting above the bare brown earth
Perched as high as the telephone lines and telephone poles
It was summer, 1967, when first I saw Montana.
This my brother John and I saw: First a cow drinking from a brook
and then sagebrush only for a hundred miles until in the distance
appeared what turned into a large grove of trees growing along
the Missouri River where the train soon would stop in Havre, Montana.
Havre people are friendly, lots of kin. They smile and say “hello”
their faces tired and dry because even though you sweat
it's so hot and dry that the sweat dries up before fully forming your face.
Only at night will the sweat beads cling to and rolls down your nose.
Morning brings biting mosquitoes and it hasn't rained
for sixty long dry days in Havre, Montana.
You see a farmer trying to scratch something
from the land, but he can't do it because
Nature's already sucked the life from it.
The family talks around the TV about how the Indians are movin' in,
from off the reservation to town, not that they are prejudiced,
but why would those Indians want to leave the hills and Beaver Creek
to come and live here, in Havre Montana.
It's so hot but you know that winter will bring twenty feet of snow
at twenty below all the time. It never never rains, it just snows and burns
here, in Havre Montana.
You can cross the Milk River and be in the badlands, a happy place if you watch out
for rattlers and like to hear the eternal silence of the sun beating down so
hard on Havre, Montana.
The hunting's good – bear, wildcat and fishing up North.
There's gold that way too. Every man and boy owns a gun
and you can still be hung right here, right in Havre, Montana.
