Thursday, May 4, 2017

Seeing Bob

I could write a small book about my relationship with the work of Bob Dylan but I'm not going to do that now.

Here are two poems.  The second one was written in 1991 by my first husband, who introduced me to the world of Bob and with whom I attended 7 performances, including the one he wrote about anticipating here.  I had the opening lines of the poem in my head all day yesterday leading up to seeing Bob that evening.

The first poem is written by me about that.  For twenty-five years I've had a friend who I met through our interest in Dylan but although separately we've seen him many times, I with various different people, we have never managed to attend a concert together until now.





expecting my last time
watching dylan
before I let him go
I am caught unawares
by the thrill
of the performance

here he is before us
bob the same bob
just being in the now
like we should all
be, telling us
things have changed

here is what he wants
to show us
this is what he feels
in these songs today
and highway 61 is joyful
and so am I

me and my dylan buddy
twenty-five years
waiting to see bob together
and it’s everything
it could be
and worth the wait

tangled up in blue
I weep for the bob-centric years
of my first lost marriage
feeling reconnected
at last to the start of
things

bob the same bob
nobody else quite right
to go with till now
restored in my heart
joyous plaintive rollicking
genius poet muso

transformative
just as it should be
leaving me wanting
the next time
knowing of course
I want to do it all again

Jane Vernon, May 2017 




last year bob
you just like a woman'd
and man in the long black coat'd
to the ceiling
of the Hammersmith Odeon
on the night the
specialists in institutionalised poison
unleashed the attack on
my invasive leukaemic cells

I listen to the tape of your
weighty cries at the foothills of thunder
              at the chords of doubt
              at the crossroads of the spirit
              in the whine of love
              in the heart of loss
as you knew them on that day
which I spent blanketed in drugs and exhaustion

a year later I tick away the days
until I see you once more
I will be there this year
to allow you to stand amid
the waves of the hugest unknowns
while east and west play armageddon
while my blood cells orgy
while beauty holds my hand

and you with you lone harmonica
sing it all for us free
as you have done
since the primal
blowin of the wind


Mike Vernon, January 1991