I saw an angel face to face, and my soul was saved.
Let me count the angels in my life
The ones with skin, the ones with fur
The ones under the ground
The ones who made the music
The ones who made me make music.
Let me count the angels
The ones who said I could
The ones who said I shouldn’t
The ones who loved me
when I did anyway.
Let me count them
The ones who put the knowledge in my head
The ones who taught by example
The ones who pulled me aside and said
you should learn this
The ones who told me they learned
from what I did or said.
Let me count the ones who saved me
I’d still be in high school
I never would have learned how to drive
What foods to put in my mouth
What films to put in my eyes
The womb – I probably never
would have left the womb.
Let me count the angels who
left me with this limp
Who inch me forward to this
nation of poems, Whose faces
make me lose count
as they remind me
I have something
worth saving.
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 25 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.
