While Passing By a Church Near My Home

I think about how the hive mind
knows how to act in one direction,
with one will and one purpose.

Chanting with all those lungs,
a thin transparent tissue of light rays 
through the diaphragm, 

Just as Ayutthaya tests it with dreams, 
those unconscious proofs of heaven framed inside
the aperture only. Your saint, the one who you
follow with a deep personal love, like that 
mahogany piano in the dining room. 

Those millivolts of devotion passed on
as memes. Illusions in the windows. 
Morrocon wars and dynastic marriages;
another white-bearded living encyclopedia
on your desk reading from the Qumran scrolls-
from animal skins, trying to match up the pieces
of a silent requiem for a different age.

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 Review, the Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, the Buffalo News, and more. 

See all his poems on Tea House here.

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