History, Natural History & the Arts
George Cassidy Payne is an independent writer, domestic violence counselor, and adjunct instructor in the humanities at Finger Lakes Community College.
George's blogs, essays, letters, poems, and photographs have been published in a wide variety of national and international outlets such as USA Today, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Buffalo News, Albany Times-Union, Syracuse Post Standard, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, The Toronto Star, The Minority Reporter, Chronogram Journal, Ovi Magazine, CounterPunch, Moria Poetry Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, Adirondack Daily Enterprise, and more.
George's first book of poetry, A Time Before Teachers, is available at Amazon.com.
In This Time of Survival
Like pickled
radishes sealed
in mason jars
with cloth fabric
toppers, the world
will come to need
poems again,
carried in wicker
baskets from the
root cellar by the tool
shed, they will be
brought inside and
opened with that
vacuum pop sound
of glass twisted.
In the biofield
farm hands
announce
sheer light
your cantaloupe
blonde hair
the way vines
relax over the
necks of grapes
I Went to College
To find out whether God exists.
To find out who I am.
Because I had no better place to go to.
Lake George
is how she saw it
a translucent
blue topaz shadow
disappearing
beneath the stump
of half-eaten pine cones
The Hush
is hearing
yourself blink.
A seductive vent
where words vanish,
before they are blown apart.
A child believing in a dandelion.
Or a small log bridge overtook
with early snow.
The signs and temples along the way,
where we must walk, all messiah-like
on the frozen water of the Siamese Ponds.
chanting our mantras on purposeful accident.
Adirondack Seaway, Summer 1981
Before the finned
dinosaurs of the Icy
emptiness
were interrupted
by the early warships
of man
they cast their
love ballads
into the velvet abyss
waiting with hearts
as untamed and big
as school buses
for the memory of
their own answer
Father’s Breakfast
He ate a crustacean
every morning
the pure wild ones
He called the lobster
a sacrament and cleaned
his table with a napkin
his grandmother sewed
when she was 14 in Idaho
I watched him eat
and the embers from the stove
cooked into crystalline spheres
I once told him that I loved him
just loud enough
so he would not hear
There is a calm
and steady
loneliness to the
half notes of sheet
metal-roofed
cabins in a hailstorm
Feedback
I am not breaking apart
I am not coming undone
I am not washed up
I am breaking open
And it’s about time
It’s okay
I trust my path
Encounter on Beaver River
Unimpressed,
he sipped easily
from the surface
until we both gazed
at the same cattail.
It was perfect and simple,
the way a child forgets
the definition of rainbows.