What Have I Done? – A Poem for Torah Portion Miketz

And Joseph was thirty years old when he
stood before Pharaoh the king of Egypt
Genesis 41:46

When I was thirty years old,
I had overcome nothing.
It was two years before the end of the world.
It was well into the American Experiment.
I hadn’t discovered Egypt, yet.

When I was thirty years old
I had no pieces of paper claiming
I had accomplished anything.
The leader did not give me his ring.
The leader did not know my name.

When I was thirty years old, my empire
had already started to crumble.
I’d written more apology letters than Pharaoh.
The grain silos were empty.

When I was thirty years old,
I lived from loaf of bread to loaf of bread.
I was lucky to have one of those.
My ego was second to none.

When Joseph was thirty years old
he’d already saved the empire.
The daughter of his former captors
rained down on him like a spouse.

When Joseph was thirty years old
he literally had the keys to the kingdom.
He set us up good in a foreign land
made us forget what it was like to be

home.

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.