Sometimes Dreams are the Pits – A poem for Parsha Vayeshev (Aliyah 1) by Rick Lupert

And Israel loved Joseph more than all his sons

Whenever my son, who is ten as of this writing,
asks me if he is my favorite, we both know that
he is my only child, and any answer other then
of course you are, would be a lie.

In this way I have it much easier than Jacob
who didn’t find it difficult at all, to give Joseph,
his favorite, a fine woolen coat, sometimes referred
to as one of many colors, much to the dismay

of his twelve other children. Or at least to the
eleven boys. Dinah, their sister, isn’t allowed to
speak up in this text. I thank my lucky stars
in the sky, one of which is assigned to my child,

that I didn’t have another. It’s not that I couldn’t
afford two coats – I’d assign them both their
own colors. I just couldn’t handle questions about
favorites. They’d see it in my wrestling eyes.



Listen now to this dream, which I have dreamed

Dreams are better to share than home movies
or vacation photos, unless you are a Fellini or
a Liebovitz. You might be flying, or without pants
in a place that requires pants, and that makes

a compelling story. But even your family will tire
of another shot of your thumb covering the lens
or the thirty minutes of waves coming in and out
that you thought was so compelling, or in this case

images of all those you are obligated to love
kneeling before you, begging for sustenance –
knowing you are forever in charge of every
breath they take. This is the kind of dream

that makes the colors run out of your coat.
That gets you dis-invited to the family reunion.
That has the people you’ve known since you
came out of your mother, digging a pit

and looking at you.

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 21 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 “Donut Famine” (Rothco Press, December 2016) 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.