For a Small Fee – A poem for Parsha Vaera

Stretch forth your staff and strike the dust of the earth, and it shall become lice throughout the entire land of Egypt.
– Exodus 8:12

And, oh, yea, there was the time when
we dropped someone off at the summer camp
who, for the sake of avoiding embarrassment

will remain anonymous, but suffice it to say,
it was not myself or my beloved, and
oh, yea, shortly after delivering him

to the mountains, a communication came
from the mountains themselves, and it said
there is a plague in [redacted]’s hair

and would you like to come back to
the mountain and retrieve him and use
your magic (and health insurance) to

rid him of the plague? And we, with
plane tickets and passports in hand
prayed to The Lord for another way.

And The Lord answered and said
oh, yea, I will stretch out My hand and
banish the plague from [redacted]’s hair

so you can travel across the ocean
to your brief, and Japanese promised land.
And so it was done and the summer camp

called and said it is done but you must pay
a small fee and, in exchange, you will go
on your way and we will wash everything.

And the means to pay the fee were
already stored in the scrolls of the mountains
and we agreed and thus, the fee was paid

and we took our plane tickets and
our passports and we flew in the belly of
a dragon to our promised land where

we wandered for weeks doing nothing but
eating and looking and looking and eating
having earned this freedom. Thank You Moses,

Thank You God, Thank you peoples of the
mountains and the far east. There is no plague
we can’t overcome, with a small fee.

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.