Give Until They Ask You to Stop – a poem for Torah Portion Vayakhel-Pekuei

Let no man or woman do any more work for the offering for the Holy.
So the people stopped bringing.

Can you imagine a time where so much had been given
all the needy organizations stopped asking for more?

They put out a call for people to stop giving?
No more room on the food bank shelves.

Empty beds for the homeless as far as the eye could see.
Everyone in Africa saying “no, thanks, I’m full.”

Even the lobbyist organizations had completed their tasks.
No-one cutting down the trees to rally against.

People forgot skin color, and religion, and the
concept of the other. All anyone saw was fellow human.

This is what it was like when God put an artist in charge.
The community gave so much they had to be asked

to stop giving. The best of everything was on hand.
They thought they were making something holy

but their generosity was what made it holy.
This was the briefest glimpse at the world yet to come.

A world we can barely imagine.
A world we have the tiniest spark of when

we drop a can of food in a barrel.
A world that starts to come into focus when

we funnel bits of our income to those who have nothing.
Let’s give until they ask us to stop.

Let that be the world we live in.

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.