All the Things — A poem for Torah Portion Noach

So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
-Genesis 8:22

There are at least half a dozen movies
in which the entire world is destroyed.
I would tell you what they are but
I don’t want to give away their endings.

There are many more films in which
the entire world is almost destroyed
but is saved at the end by the efforts
of the people we’re rooting for.

These make it easy for us to imagine
all of it going away. All of our buildings and legacies.
All the things we’ve written down.
All our recipes and shortcuts.

Floating away or incinerated or
simply vanishing with a snap.
Even the news is in on it, showing us
vanishing rainforests and rising coastlines.

Showing us the names of animals who
haven’t set foot on the Earth since
before our grandparents. The air we breathe
the layer of whatever that creates

a separation between space and us
so fragile, if you trust the scientists.
We do what we can. We go solar.
We replace our grass with rock.

We eventually turn off the faucet.
Hoping all of the faucets don’t
permanently turn off. This may be
what the Promiser had up their sleeve

when they told us so long as the earth exists.
You mean there could be a time when it doesn’t
is the question Noah never asked as the animals
filed off the ark, and he was given permission

to eat almost all of them.

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.