Complaints – A poem for Parsha Beshalach

The entire community of the children of Israel complained against Moses
and against Aaron in the desert.
-Exodus 16:2

There’s a comfortable familiarity
to the word complain.

Two Jews, three opinions.
That’s not the right melody.

There’s no food in the desert.
The water is bitter.

That’s not the way we usually do that.
Why did anything ever have to change?

We complain so much the complaints
themselves feel like our childhood blanket.

I’m wrapped up in the warmth of telling you
what’s wrong with this situation.

It’s nice that free bread came out of the sky
but do we really want to eat bread that’s

been in the dirt? In Egypt we weren’t free
but at least we knew our address.

It was nice singing and dancing on
the other side of the sea. Why don’t we

have parties like that anymore?
Complaining is one of our unofficial holidays.

And what’s with the holidays when we don’t eat?
Who thought that was a good idea?

It’s nice that the angel of death didn’t get us
but couldn’t we have achieved that without the blood?

And what about the line lengths of this poem?
Why are they all different sizes?

The words are nice but it’s hard to look at.
We can do so much better than 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 26 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 “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii” (Poems written in Hawaii – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2022) 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.