Idol Chatter – a poem for Torah Portion Ki Tisa

Come on! Make us gods that will go before us,
because this man Moses, who brought us up from
the land of Egypt we don’t know what has become of him.

You should never be late to your own party.
They’ll get restless and declare someone else
the honoree.

When they start to pull off their jewelry
(even the men wore earrings back then)
and melt it down, they will not be

making an effigy of You. We’ve been
making Gods out of things since things existed.
Television, movie screen, celebrity,

statue in the harbor, elected official, money,
video game, designer purse, sex, the moon –
any excuse to worship outside religion.

To find an easy thing to tell us what to do.
Thousands of years ago the technology was
as good as a golden calf.

Today we have TMZ to tell us who is holy
and a virus is taking us all down like
idol builders at the end of righteous swords.

I’m going to set up my tent on the outside
of the city. Prostrate myself to the internet.
Wait for all this to pass.

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.