Like, is this really all happening again? – A poem for Parsha Breisheit by Rick Lupert

The Earth was astonishingly empty

Like a blank canvas
Like no-one had thought darkness and light
needed to be different
Like a flyover state
Like someone bumped into something
and said I should
really do something with this.

Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water,
and let it be a separation between water and water.

Like the water was too close to the water
Like the invention of the reverse canal industry
Like this should be the base ingredient
for everything
let’s stir this up

And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering
of the waters He called seas

Like you get to be the Guy who names everything
Like everyone will need either shoes or a boat
Like when I say everyone, you should know
at this point, there was no-one.
Like a population explosion is going to need
a place to hang its hat

Let there be luminaries in the expanse of the heavens,
to separate between the day and between the night

Like the separation between night and day
was the original dimmer switch
Like the biggest things in the sky are
not always the closest
Like I can stare directly at one, but not the other
Like the gravity of this situation is
just coming together

And God created the great sea monsters,
and every living creature that crawls

Like the word monsters wasn’t inserted into
the beginning of the oldest text
just to keep our attention
Like anyone can tell you this wasn’t
the very first genre fiction
Like our fear of monsters was seeded
at the very beginning

Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness

Like He’s either talking in the royal We or
there are some characters we
have yet to be introduced to
Like this isn’t the very first evidence
of Vanity
Like you could make a self portrait
that could take on a billion
lives of its own

And [God] abstained on the seventh day from all His work

Like the two day weekend doesn’t
extend Shabbat beyond
its natural boundaries
Like a forever pillow that stops in
every week
Like the vacation they told you to take
before you were born
but never do
It’s time

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.