A Fellowship of Dreams and Desire

a poem partially stolen from Martin Mc Carthy

Photo by Saulius Sutkus on Unsplash

I did not expect to find you here,
among these little shells and things
skittering from shore to shore
in a vast eternity 
of sea-foam; but here you are, 
light years from when I met you.

A fellowship of dreams and desire
brought me here on memory’s waves,
a castaway of the past,
a pilgrim of the ocean’s
eternal forgetfulness—
But now I remember you.

So much has happened since we last met,
so many questions gone unasked,
and now I find your footprint
in the sand and your message
curled up inside a bottle
but still alive and breathing,

telling me that you, too, have harbored
the flame of the sun in your chest
and on the far horizon
where somehow you and I lost
the one grain of sand we shared,
the fellowship now reclaimed.

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Note: I refashioned the first stanza above from a poem by

Martin Mc Carthy

. The stanza thus formatted could be called a “hexastich” of the sort I’ve been writing in connection with my consultations of the I Ching over the past year or so. This time, however, instead of basing the poetry on the consultation, I reversed the process (as I’ve done recently with my similar thievery of material by Morgan Waters, Megan Youngmee, Jed Moffitt, Troy Putney, Peter Himmelman, and Sam Aureli) and used the syllable counts of the lines (9-8-7-7-7-7) to arrive at a reading of the I Ching, which I then imposed, along with those same syllable counts, on the subsequent stanzas written by me and combining into what I call a Fourfold Oracular-Syllabic Hexastich (or FOSH) — in this case, pointing to the 13th hexagram of the I Ching, “Fellowship” with line 1 changing (reflected in its 9 syllables) which in turn points to Hexagram 33, “Retreat.” If you’d like to delve further into the meaning of these hexagrams and the changing lines, I’d recommend the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation (pretty easy to come by in used bookstores and libraries but also here) or Paul O’Brien’s more contemporary but also excellent Visionary I Ching.

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The source:

Gasp

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