What They Put on My Feetsies – A poem for Parsha Tzav

And Moses brought Aaron and his sons forward and bathed them in water…and clothed them with tunics, girded them with sashes, and bound them up with high hats
-Leviticus 8:6 and 8:13

I don’t remember the first time I was old enough
to decide what I was going to wear.

I know, for the longest time, it wasn’t up to me and
I’ve seen the photographic evidence to back this up.

Little outfits to make me seem like I was a little man
(not much has changed in that department.)

Including knit booties I had barely taken a breath
in this world before they were stuffed onto my feetsies.

I can only imagine being anointed with bath water
far more often than I would have preferred and

without being asked for my permission.
(Can you imagine this flying in our current age?)

I don’t know what to think of the top-hats Moses put
on Aron’s sons…were they doing a play about Lincoln?

That feels anachronistic but when the entire Torah
was already written while the events were still happening

I guess anything is possible. Now my son is big enough
to make his own decisions about how to adorn his body.

Though I’m not sure the wisdom has fully formed as
the only color that leaves his room is red and it feels

like a conscious decision born of not wanting to
spend the time over a thoughtful curation.

You can pay people now to pick your clothes and
even put them on your body as if you were personally

being documented by Downton Abbey. I hear Prince Charles
has someone who irons his shoelaces and I do like

to believe everything I read. The clothes make the man
and the woman. The clothes make the priest.

Moses…tell me what to wear. I don’t have time to
think about these things anymore.

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.