I Forget What This Poem is About – A Poem for Haftarah Tetzaveh / Shabbat Zachor by Rick Lupert

Shabbat of Remembrance –
I’m having trouble remembering
all the things I’m told

my biological DVR should hold.
I have a vague memory of
standing at a mountain

but the details of what
I was supposed to do with
Amalek’s sheep are fuzzy.

Kill them all? Can that be right?
That doesn’t sound like me.
Is this why Saul almost lost

his anointed job? Because he
wouldn’t kill the sheep? I had to
look up the word prostrate

because I forgot what it meant
or maybe I never knew. I can’t
put my face on the floor for

every mistake. It’s so dirty like
the floor of the sea was, which I
remember every time I

put on my shoes. Or dirty
like the gallows after Haman and
his sons hung there for days.

I eat a three sided cookie
to remember this because
nothing paints a picture like food.

Haman and his great great
no-one really knows ancestor Agag
their names written on our shoes.

Our mandate – to wipe them
from our memories, as every year
we remember them.

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 “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.