Glaciers, Cats and Covid (Oh, My) – a poem for Torah Portion Noach

Everything that had the breath of the spirit of life in its nostrils,
of all that were on the dry land, died.

I like a Torah that isn’t afraid to use the word nostrils.
I only mention it because, soon, someone will
interact with mine, or at least, one of mine

when I go to get the test to determine if
I am one of the stricken. I’ve been quarantined
inside this ark in Van Nuys for months so

I’m not too worried, but knowledge is king.
For example, the word cubit means an
ancient unit of length.

Someday the word COVID will be ancient
in the same way we refer to the plague as something
from long ago, when there was less knowledge.

In the mean time all the glaciers are melting.
So far, only some of them have melted,
but the scientists have measured

the cubits against the temperature and
all signs point to it’s time to gather the
gopher wood. In the news, they held

a funeral for one of the glaciers.
Actually, it’s happened more than once.
Glacier funerals are a growth industry.

We have five cats in our house which
may seem like a left turn, but I just want
you to know if our house floats away

and we need to share the responsibility
of repopulating the beasts of the Earth
we’ve got cats covered.

That is to assume the water will recede this time
The cubits are telling us it may just be heat
in our future. Now that I think about it,

we had the cats fixed, which is a word
that means we broke them. So you
probably can’t count on us for the cats.

I’m going to bide my time by petting them all
while I wait for them to put a cubit in my nostril.
I wish we could fix all of this.

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 “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) 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.