A gallery of spiritual poetry and resonant imagery from Oleg Yuzefpolsky
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Exhorting the Karmically-Connected to Hear the Buddha’s Compassionate Deliverance
What does “exhorting” mean when it comes to the Buddhas teaching us?
Returning to Donald Scripps: Comfort Characters and the Considered Life
What can your comfort character teach you?
A Letter to Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay)
“We will meet at the source of each moment, and we will meet again in different forms of life.” Dear Thay, In deep gratitude for meeting Thay and the Plum Village Sangha. Thay, it has been some time since you passed away. Still, your memory remains more alive than ever. I still remember the morning […]
Looking Out From Stony Island
Carve out my tongueI will taste your wind Slice off my earsI will hear your waves Gouge out my eyesI will see your red sun setting Tear off my fingertips I will touch your stones For I do not need the presence of your solemn grandeur as it perishes along a silent lakeshore In the ashes of our ancestors inside […]
Late Summer
The spell is over. The orgy is over. We get what we want, then time runs out. We who were born by phallus and wand pass on. Like summer flowers thriving in the untended edges of the yard. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary […]
The Wall (For Roger Waters)
I loved you, the way jewels are left unclaimed on the ocean floor. I loved you forevermore, and I knew all along that such a place does not exist. I loved you, the way a pike devours a frog when it is not watching, you know how fast they can get out of the way. […]
The Disbanding of an Assumption
doubting you would, under the Ford Street Bridge at dawn, you kissed me, as a trumpet vine grabs onto every available surface, on arbors, fences, telephone poles, and trees, you wrapped your tendrils into my yellow throat and made the world feel closer than it ever has before.Unmediated by the veil of what we think we know, I kissed you back, and together we became unfamiliar, like finding new oceans. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included […]
A Bond
As lemongrass holds the river’s first shimmer of morning light, you possessme. Drifting in the marsh, my fingertips dipping in the water, like a luminous blue god, you have become an idea that I can no longer doubt without proving my devotion. Yes,you hold me, you hold me, you hold me as wood holds the frame of a house, or as iron […]