Peace Offering – A poem for Parsha Vayikra

And from the peace offering, he shall bring a fire offering to the Lord
-Leviticus 3:9

In the oldest days peace came
in the form of slaughter.

You can read the details of the ritual –
Which animal, what happens

with its kidneys and liver,
how it all becomes     smoke.

Not far away and a couple millennia
gone by, the chief oligarch

brings a three mile convoy
of peace

and claims of NAZIs to sweep away.
Our pale of settlement

gets more pale.
Around the world the banks

make a forceful peace –
An electronic siege.

The technology of war
has kept up.

Meanwhile, the number of
living humans fluctuate.

Who or what do I need to
slaughter today to have my

peace offering heard? There’s nothing
in the fine print about 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 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.