From Praises, no. 29:

Of Bob Dylan

Moon blowing away like a dandelion;
Radio wavers, bounced off Orion with codes
Of its own. The song says there’s roads
In this hole, where a hound sounds like iron.

Bowlegged old men carry in the bone
The suffering children from Chi-town to Rome
To Biloxi – pellagra and rickets and lice.
The toll of their hardships got caught in your
backwoods voice.

Across the fields you point out
The burnt shell of your father’s house.

Silence, rain, the road not going nowhere,
going away,
Blackbird singing on the Red Wing wall.
Two lanes of 61, St Paul to Thunder Bay,
Mercury glints on grass, lightning’s eastbound scrawl…

John Gibbens (photograph by Keith Baugh)

If you haven’t already, you might like to check out
The Nightingale’s Code: a poetic study of Bob Dylan

This poem also appeared in Jewels & Binoculars, an anthology of poems about or inspired by Bob Dylan, edited by Phil Bowen and published by Stride/Westwords in 1993.

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