
George Cassidy Payne is interested in the intersection of poetry, social justice, representations of spirituality, and concepts of self. He is a part-time professor of philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) and teaches workshops focusing on writing and philosophy. He holds a master’s degree in philosophical theology from Emory University.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Barnstorm Journal, Chronogram Magazine, Adelaide, the Adirondack Almanac, Tea House, The Mindful Word, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, the Scarlet Leaf Review, The Writing Disorder, Califragile, Zingara Poetry Review, Deep South Magazine, Allegro Poetry Review, and several others. His debut full-length collection, A Time Before Teachers, was released in 2019 from Cholla Needles Literary Press. Find him on the web here.
POETRY
- River Teach Me
- Looking Out From Stony Island
- Born Again
- Breckenridge
- Late Summer
- Strength
- The Wall (For Water Rogers)
- In Essence
- The Disbanding of an Assumption
- Detox Prayer
- A Bond
- Sri Yantra
- At First Sight
- A Midnight Oracle
- What You Cannot Help Naming
- The Bobcat
- A Definition of Bliss (for Joseph Campbell)
- I Miss You
- Virgin Birth
- The Birth of the Sacred Mirrors (for Alex Grey)
- Fire Sacrifice
- Echolocation
- I will not be the last man to tell you
- Lord Shiva
- Twin Flame
- A Graveyard Meditation
- At a Red Light
- If I Were a Philosopher
- Nothing we see is color
- Leaving the tunnel
- Marma Points
- Restoration
- Till death us do part
- Catacombs of Domitilla
- Birding
- A Moment in the Backyard
- The Lost Part of the Human Brain
- Lost Monarchs
- Elegy for Nirvana
- In…sigh…t
- The Mouth of the Tiger Lily 2
- The Mouth of the Tiger Lily
- Wild Turkey
- Afterwards
- Distillation 2
- Distillation
- bow
- Alone again
- Samsara
- Out of Reach
- Private: A Separation
- The Chickadees
- Creation
- A New Moon Intention
- Collectibles
- The Sturgeon
- A Mountain Prayer
- Where the River Bends
- Unopened Presents
- First, We Must Go to the Edge
- Prince of the Underground
- Dad
- Gemini Reflections
- I Am Not the Body
- How Archimedes Proved Ideas
- In the biofield
- Your calling
- Like a Bottle of 10 Year McKenna
- Grieving
- Changing the Rules
- Georgia O’Keefe’s Taos
- Birds of Prey
- The Sacred
- Journals
- An Unquestioned Gift
- Journals
- Clocks
- Feedback
- Spider Bite
- To Leave Something Behind
- Scene From a Shaker Cemetery
- I Exist
- My Future Arrived
- There is a calm
- 3:20 AM
- Don’t Try
- Process
- Florida Bound
- A Time of Survival
- Awe Is…
- On a Soccer Field Behind the Rec Center
- Death
- Silence
- Cyberspace
- Back Then
- Two Worlds
- Animal
- Curiosity
- Out of Nothing
- A Scene from Cumberland Bay
- After Meditating On My Front Porch
- The Tao is broken, too
- After the Tear Gas
- Humpbacks 2
- The Persistence of Memory
- Falling in Love
- 6 Days and 6 Weeks
- The feeling of difference
- Listen to the Wild
- The Holy Spirit
- As Benedictines
- Stormy Night
- Heaven and Earth
- my favorite cage
- Another Letter to the Editor
- Holy of Hollies
- Not Even His Mother
- My Turn
- The Last Days of Summer
- Letter to an Editor
- My Turn
- Everything Is Invented
- How To Fall Out of Love
- Boulder, Colorado
- A Drowning
- Speaking Of Humility
- All You Need Is Love
- When Film Took More Than Time
- Genocide is at the top
- How to Treat Water
- The reason elephants console each other
- Unsolicited Advice to the Class of 2020
- Chimps
- Radiation from the Big Bang
- Promise of Spring
- Sewn by Mom
- Encounter on the Moose River
- Whispering
- A Buddhist Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic
- Bio-graph
- Mobius Strip
- After Breathing
- Bread
- Stillness
- The Life Waiting For Us (For Joseph Campbell)
- A Pandemic of Hope
- Chi
- Full of Noise
- The Call
- What I Have Faith In
- Ebola
- I Know You Know
- Blue Mountain II
- Reduced to Zero: A Personal Experiment with Fasting
- Have You Seen My Integrity?
- We Need the Soil
- 96 Hours In
- Harvest Moon
- I awoke in the belly of a poem
- Replaced
- Hands of Light
- Search and Rescue
- Ferguson
- Tears of Tonglen
- Bow & Be
- Like Raindrops
- Driving Through Seattle
- Olympic
- A Thought I Had While Swimming in Kimbe Bay
- Conversion
- Patriotism and Other Myths
- What We Need to Dream
- My Brother’s Knife
- Alice Walker
- A Mind Engaged
- The Earth Is An Ordinary Friend
- Sunset Over Henderson Harbor
- Heart Mountain in Wyoming
- The Unpicked
- Caught Between the Hours
- Messiahs
- Is This How I Wanted it to Go?
- The Heart is a Constellation (2)
- Is This How I Wanted it to Go?
- When Daybreak Knows
- Littered With Salvation
- Home
- Your Words Are the Path
- Genesis Reborn
- Neither Slave Nor Master
- Does God Exist? (for J. Krishnamurti)
- Lavinia
- To Die Like Marat
- At the Edge of the Sea (for Rachel Carson)
- The Firebrands
- Looking for a Place to Go
- The Art of Being
- If the World Falls Down
- I Searched Back
- Before Words
- A Sacrament
- A Yellow Cardinal
- No Longer Lost
- Hercules Without Muscles
- Leaf Pile
- The Delta
- The Blankness of Being
- I’m a Surrealist
- Sarnath
- Does ET Have a Soul?
- How a Philosopher Looks at a Glass of Water
- America the Beautiful
- An Offering
- Remote Viewing the Five Ponds Wilderness
- Thanksgiving (Inspired by Francis of Assisi)
- A Perfect Stillness
- Nirvana
- Soul Cliche
- Daydreamers
- Even a Full Moon Needs Sunlight
- Falling Into the Well
- My Core
- How Children See
- We Are This Kind of Species
- A Force of Life That We Named
- It Exists In You
- St. James Parish, Barbados
- The Face I Choose To Wear The Most Often
- A Time Before Teachers
- Puerta Del Diablo
- 400 Million Miles From the Sun
- Cogito Ergo Sum
- Buddha Taught
- Dionysius Moon
- Messenger
- Why Mars Has No Temples
- At the Core
- My Mood Feels
- Why Poetry is Well Suited for Space Work
- I Need My Used Book Store
- Your Homegrown Smile
- Two Monks Arguing About Movement
- Where Deer Sleep
- While Passing By a Church Near My Home
- America
- What You Don’t Get in Church
- The History of the Earth
- Yet I Am No Brahmin
- Go Ahead and Steal My Shoes
- Surrendering
- Grooving With the Eternal Now
- The Devil of Omniscience
- The Geometry of Devils and Angels
- Making Music and Dancing
- The Blankness of Being (For Alan Watts)
- The Lease Among Us Included
- Seen from the Surface of Mars
- The Human Condition in Eight Stanzas
- Unconscious of the Changes
- Like Bees Lost From the Hive
- Discovering the Pain of the World by Accident
- What the Mind Describes
- More Than An Enemy
- The Earth Which Preceded Us
- When Everything First Began to Begin
- The Spiral Staircases of Corinth
- All About Owls
- A Long Pause
- Anything but the Way to Make a Living
- I know This Forest
- You Are My Brother
- The Mud Softer than Ivory
- Mendon Ponds
- The Heart is a Constellation
- Always Ringing
- Ordinary Like Our Sun
- Simulator
- A Good Kiss
- A Poem Written on the Day Mary Oliver Died
- From the Beginning
- Primitive Religion
- Sirius or Capella
- The Vineyard
- That it May Start in Balance
- Grace Peak
- Something Rather Than Nothing
- After the Flowers
- Tea by the Batten Kill
- Close to Timberline
- A Sound Reminding Me
- Weightless Noises
- Last Virgin Pine
- Swept Away
- A Measure of the Disorder
- Blue Mountain Jewel
- Find Your Jewel
- The Way of Zen