These are those counted of the children of Israel:
six hundred and one thousand and seven hundred and thirty
As far as numbers go, that’s pretty good.
With over six hundred thousand (not including the Levites)
you could start a medium sized town.
You could march on Washington and
still be more impressive than the last inauguration.
You’d be pretty close to the population of Baltimore
and not too far off from Louisville.
You’d be one tenth of the number of Israelites
taken during the Holocaust (back when
the term Israelite hadn’t been used for
a couple thousand years.) You’d be twenty percent
of the number of COVID-19 cases in
the United States of America as of the day
these words found space on this electronic paper.
You’d be enough to scare any small gang of bullies away.
You’d fill up six Rose Bowls…three times that many
if you were maintaining a safe social distance.
If each one had a dollar you still couldn’t
afford to buy a decent house in Los Angeles
(and you wouldn’t all fit in it anyway.)
With six hundred thousand, Jews especially,
you’d have at least seven hundred thousand opinions.
You’d have that many interpretations of these words.
And even more of the oldest words.
You’d be the beginnings of a civilization.
The begetters of millions. Award winning millions.
Noisy, noisy millions.
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.
