You Can’t Choose Your Family – A poem for Parsha Vayeshev

And they took him and cast him into the pit

I grew up without a sibling
so never had the young impetus
to throw mine into a pit.

I say mine because
decades into my existence
a brother and sister came along.

Plus the one I married into.
Not quite the baker’s dozen
that Jacob produced

but a lot to love when
my entire youth was spent
in rooms alone.

I try not to show off,
like Joseph, but sometimes
I fail and greet them with

multi-colored coats
hanging out of my hellos.
It’s a wonder I haven’t

been in a pit so many times.
I should have my furniture
sent directly to the pit.

They say you can’t choose
your family and I say, sometimes,
It feels like we’re actively

not choosing each other.
I know there’s no choice here.
There are forever bonds that

legal documents can’t break.
There may be more pits.
I foresee tests and groveling.

But like Jacob and Esau
and Joseph and his many brothers
our future is always intertwined

with embraces and blood
with airplanes and celebration
with love and loss

with every hope
of the ones who
gave us life.

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 25 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 “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) 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.