Gathering Together

a poem partially stolen from Megan Youngmee

Tulips atop Mount Royal, May 2025—Photo by Potter

The body: a sacred sensor, 
a place of trauma and 
revelation holding 
memory, pain and power—
our home, the point that connects
heaven and earth. Megan Youngmee

wrote that and little did she know
her words were yarrow stalks
gathering together
and forming these yin and yang
lines of an I Ching reading
hidden in the poem’s sinews.

The bones of the poem’s body
a series of yin lines
unexpectedly strong,
the sacred sensing nerve-ends
of the next two young yang lines
recalling pain but finishing

as a gathering together 
of the forces of joy
pointing to a changing
into the preponderance
of the great as joy moves on
into the undaunted future.

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Note: I assembled the first stanza above from a recent poem by

Megan Youngmee

(that she had previously assembled from a Note at the urging of

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 Jed Moffitt, Troy Putney, Peter Himmelman, and Sam Aureli) and used the syllable counts of the lines (8-6-6-7-7-8) 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 45th hexagram of the I Ching, “Gathering Together” with lines 2 and 3 changing (reflected in the 6 syllables of each of those lines) which in turn points to Hexagram 28, “The Preponderance of the Great.” If you’d like 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:

The point that connects

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