The Divine Ink of Forever – A Poem for Haftarah Eikev by Rick Lupert

You have to take the good with the bad.
The ups with the downs. The sickness with the health
The exile with the occupation.

You have to understand sometimes
you’ll spend time apart, sometimes you’ll
spend time together when you’d rather be apart.

Sometimes, the two of you in the same room
is better than a free chocolate fountain. Better than
a perpetual pool-side vacation.

You have to know sometimes you’ll feel abandoned
when it’s really just a matter of scheduling. Sometimes
you’ll want more of the air to breathe yourself

and there’s the other party taking up their
share of oxygen in the very same room. Sometimes
you’ll have to change the diaper when you were

the last one to change the diaper and you were
sure it couldn’t possibly have been your turn.
This is a partnership. This is ongoing.

It couldn’t be any more forever than this.
That ring on your finger, that pillar of smoke
you followed in the desert. That Ketubah

you signed is still hanging and you can see it
on the wall, all the way back home, all the way
from this exile, all the way reminding you

that ink you used – It’s divine.
It never erases.
It never will.

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 22 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 “Beautiful Mistakes” (Rothco Press, May 2018) and edited the anthologies “A Poet’s Siddur: Shabbat Evening“,  “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.