Photograph by Keith Baugh

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

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