Extract From The Perfect Voice For Bob Dylan Poem by Martin Mc Carthy

I
What can I say about Bob Dylan?

That some strange, authentic light
passed into him from blind bluesmen
on corners, singing their stories
of trains and chains and hope;
blind bluesmen, miles from any college
or guitar academy, with the wind
at their backs, or their backs
against some wall in East Texas,
playing sublime bottleneck guitar
with the necks of broken bottles.

That he was light-hearted and free
and only twenty,
when he first took to the road,
with ten dollars, a harmonica,
and his guitar;
that he saw Woody Guthrie
signposting the way to go …
and went, with little inclination
to look back on old Duluth,
dying in the moonlight.

That he enrolled early in that authentic,
beaming and screaming college
of real life, and never left it,
because all he needed - all the diverse,
sounds and colours of that authenticity -
met him there and filled his spirit;
that his America was always a place
in which unwanted migrants moved
across railway tracks and truck yards,
seeking somewhere to remain.

That he was young when he left home -
young and ready to change the world forever,
if only he could elude
the Rising Sun's beckoning sirens;
that he could look north to where the wind
was blasting against the borderline,
yet pluck from his heart
the gentlest of chords …
or walk, arm in arm, with his girl
down the boulevard of broken dreams.

That he understood the essential
difference between someone who sings
and a real singer … how a song
must possess him and keep him close
to the trembling, naked world
which summons songs into being;
that the unfiltered sounds
of all things flowed through him -
all the discordant, muddy voices
of the river that bore the slaves.

That he recounted in fearless detail
the sad tale of Emmett Till: how he was
butchered by a ghostly cohort
of the white-robed Ku Klux Klan;
that he thought long and hard about them,
and about the senseless slaying of Hattie Carroll:
how justice favours those who rule,
rather than those whose small, arduous lives
are shackled to their masters' tables,
until they die there - violently or otherwise.

That he saw death up close and chose to be
the lonesome traveller whose life task
was to unmask the truth,
in a world where the truth kept dancing ahead,
like some elusive tambourine player;
that he sang in his own way,
with a force that moved the world
and asked big questions about being a man …
what it means … and how to make each choice,
and did it all so earnestly in that perfect voice.