I see the way the branches of the apple trees and maples dance in a gentle post-rain wind. I hear the raw cry of a mother raven as she brings food to her young, and I watch the late afternoon sun …. These words are woven into the preamble of an exchange but they come to me on a breeze that has wended across the Great Plains, over mountains and rivers and lakes, in innocence and introspection, in a search for signs of faith, in an effort to understand the brokenness of creation and the fear of annihilation in the absence of an olive branch, in the presence of a mystery. The fires that lately raged still smolder in these syllables, but words are beginning to form into sentences that speak from love infused with a new song emerging to be born from the ocean breezes.
Note: I extracted the first stanza above from the recent musings of in poetic prose — now broken into lines by me. 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, and Sam Aureli) and used the syllable counts of the lines (7-8-8-9-9-9) to point to a reading of the I Ching, which I then imposed, along with those same syllable counts, on the subsequesnt stanzas written by me and combining into what I call a Fourfold Oracular-Syllabic Hexastich (or FOSH) — in this case, pointing to the 25th hexagram of the I Ching, “Innocence (The Unexpected)” with lines 3-6 changing (reflected in the nine syllables of each of the last three lines). If you’d like delve further into the meaning of the hexagram 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.
The source:
Jonathan, this is a superb poem - a poem for the troubled times in which we live, and in which poets continue to speak - to acknowledge devastating events, but also to believe in love and the amazing beauty of life, nevertheless.
"The fires that lately raged
still smolder in these syllables,
but words are beginning to form
into sentences that speak from love
infused with a new song emerging
to be born from the ocean breezes."
These lines grabbed me:
"in the absence of an olive branch,
in the presence of a mystery."