Fire is the New Rain – A poem for Parsha Noach

And the rain was upon the earth

for forty days and forty nights.

Replace rain with fire
and it’s almost like
it’s happening again.

From the very first day
of the Santa Ana winds
some part of the southland

has burned. No warning
came. No directive to
build an ark.

What kind of boat isn’t
flammable, anyway?
Or maybe I’m not

righteous enough to
receive the instructions.
While people with

infinite money flee their
acreages. While schools
shut down because

they’re concerned about
breathing. While pillars
of smoke, visible by

anyone with eyes
reminds us we may have
screwed this whole thing up.

I’m holding my wife
and son and cats close
pleading for another chance.

We need the sky to
open up and wash
all of this away.

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 23 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 “Hunka Hunka Howdee!” (Poems written in Memphis, Nashville, and Louisville – Ain’t Got No Press, May 2019) 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.