Frogs Everywhere – A poem for Parsha Vaera

And the Nile will swarm with frogs, and they will go up and come
into your house and into your bedroom and upon your bed…

–Exodus 7:28

If you haven’t seen the movie Magnolia
please skip to next week’s Torah portion.
I don’t want to give anything away.

Frogs rain out of the sky. It’s Biblical.
(Or it’s a rare meteorological event that
has never been witnessed by scientists.)

If you haven’t been a five year old in a room with
me (and your teacher) and my guitar during Passover
please make arrangements.

I want you to experience the joy of
imagining frogs in Pharaoh’s underwear.
It had to have happened.

The text tells us they were in his bed.
It’s not just a song lyric. It’s a Biblical fact.
If you haven’t dissected a frog in school

I’m okay with that. But if you did
did you look into its eyes before you
pulled its skin down like pants?

Did you imagine its ancestors
falling out of the sky causing all the havoc?
One frog is cute. Two frogs is a shidduch.

Three frogs is on its way to a situation.
Any more frogs and your amphibian habitat
is rendered useless.

You will not be able to provide enough flies.
Tom Cruise will not be able to help.
It’s time to let the people go.

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.