Tongue Tips – A poem for Parsha Yitro

if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure
out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth.
–Exodus 19:5

Sometimes I want to take over the world
with everything I’ve done – a light shining on
every word I’ve written, my name

on marquees and billboards, on the tip
of everyone’s tongues. Other times I crave
the anonymity of other people’s success.

I don’t want to walk into a room and
assume everyone wants my autograph.
I want to receive their gifts.

Let them wash over me like a
newly discovered continent. I don’t deserve
half the things I have, and telling me

just because I follow the Rules
I get a better seat in the auditorium
brings up the struggle between

wanting to enjoy the view, and
wishing the best for everyone behind me.
Our oldest words keep telling us

we’ve got it going on – more so than
everyone else whose blood brings oxygen
to their brains just like mine.

Labeling one people as a treasure out of all
has led to the wrong statues going up
and that aforementioned blood

flowing in the streets. Let what I do,
and better yet, who I am, be just as good
as everyone who wasn’t at the mountain.

Let everyone see that.
Let everyone be that.
We are the entire earth.

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.