Unrequited Trilogy – A Poem for Haftarah Tetzaveh

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Ezekiel envisions a trilogy
when no-one has yet agreed to a sequel.
Dust from the first Temple

still rises from the rubble
and he already knows the second one
which is barely an idea yet

will also come down.
Oh, prophet, where are you when
we all need the lottery numbers?

Couldn’t you tell them
not to bother with number two?
The construction costs

the wasted effort.
Safety regulations weren’t
a glint in anyone’s eye back then

so you know this second one
will cost lives. Perhaps the grand plan
is a cliff-hanger? I wouldn’t

give away all these details of
the epic conclusion of the trilogy.
We’re coming up on

three thousand years since
you laid out the sacred blueprints
and Temple number three

has yet to get through
the permitting phase. It only took
a couple of hand-fulls of decades

to get the second one going.
And this many millennia gone by
we’ve all forgotten what a cubit is.

I love a story arc more than
the average person, but at this point
I don’t think the funding is coming through.

I’ll be at the shul on the corner.
They serve bagels on Saturdays.
It’s stood since longer than me.