Another Failed Test – A poem for Parsha Vayera

Drive out this handmaid and her son, for the son of this
handmaid shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac.
-Genesis 21:10

Think of what might have been
had Abraham not sent Ishmael away.

Stones not thrown
in the place where they
keep throwing stones.

Where borders keep changing
and no one agrees what they are
anyway.

Where sweet and salt
mix together like water springing up
out of the desert.

Both sides of the river, forever
everybody’s inheritance.

A father and a son
not separated.

A handmaiden who carried a son
taken care of as she should have been.

Maybe they wouldn’t be hanging
words of hate over the 405 Freeway?

I think of the unrepairable mistakes
I’ve made that reverberate throughout
the decades of my life.

This one’s up there.

My heart still weeps for everyone
I’ve treated like Ishmael.

I open my tent, like Abraham,
and pray the long-lost
will come 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 26 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 “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii” (Poems written in Hawaii – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2022) 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.