Led Zeppelin Has Ruled Eternally – A poem for Haftarah Noach by Rick Lupert

When mountains crumble to the sea
there would still be you and me

“Thank you” – Led Zeppelin / Robert Plant

By these waters of Babylon, which, as best as I can tell,
we will only be wading in for another five minutes.

It feels like we’ve been babbling on for so long
we don’t know how to babble off.

Our jilted lover, the Holy Land, sits like an empty womb
waiting for us to fill her up. She doesn’t know why we’ve gone

or why it’s been so long, or if we’ll ever come back.
There’s just the emptiness and all it probably means.

But like the promise of the rainbow, Isaiah, the Robert Plant of his day,
reminds us this Relationship goes well beyond our own lives.

You may flood or wildfire or hurricane our buildings away
but consider it just a lover’s spat. This is the Love of all Loves

The Love that says Hey remember where that mountain
used to be? I just cleared it away to make more room for

how I feel about you. It’s almost time to start walking south.
Our back is gotten. We’ve got a nation to knock up.

…and don’t let that image get you all out of sorts.
It’s just a metaphor. These are all just metaphors.

You don’t think a mountain really crumbled into the sea
do you? Or maybe you know of one which did

in which case there may be a lot more to this
then you were ever willing to believe.

Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 21 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “Donut Famine” (Rothco Press, December 2016) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.