Nothing to See Here — A poem for Parsha Vayelech

Then Moses wrote this Torah
-Deuteronomy 31:9

It takes us a year to read the Torah
and not even all of it.

Three years or more to read every word
as it’s assigned, if we even bother.

Who has the time when brunch calls out
on Saturdays, and we

rarely observe market days anymore?
Odds are we’ll never read

the whole Thing, I mean I will, but
it’s taking me seven years.

I think I read the whole Thing once
and maybe I wrote a book about it

but that was a few years ago now
and as our accomplishments get

further and further away, it gets
harder to brag about them.

Like all those bands who wrote that
one song we all know, and love

but never did anything else that
we were compelled to remember.

So in five words Moses writes
This entire Torah, and then moves on

as if that wasn’t a super-human thing to do
described in one of the shortest

goings-up we have to read.
He’s somehow writing this Torah

while we’re reading it.
All these meta questions are

forming in my head, but
before they’ll get answered

someone’s going to hit the
reset button and all of this will

start over as if
nothing has happened.

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.