The Festival of Weeks – A poem for Shavuot

Like honey and milk, it lies under your tongue
–Song of Songs 4:11

When we’re born we count our age in days,
That quickly changes to weeks and then months
which lasts for a while, even after a year.

But then, it is only years we measure our time by.
Imagine if three decades in someone proclaimed
to be three hundred and sixty months old.

At a certain point, we can only perceive the
passage of time in the largest possible increments.
The minute-by-minute details, lost to our past.

Then, once a year, after we put the matzah away
we slow it back down to weeks – to savor the
passing moments, to establish a yearning for

what we will be given. All of us, standing at the mountain
as if our flesh was on that soil. As if we spent
forty days looking up, as if we were prepared for

the sweetness about to land on our tongues.
It is at this point our memory kicks in, of
miracles we saw through other people’s eyes.

This book of our past which we read to
guide our future, which we struggle with
to understand the why and how of history.

This Jewish textbook for our lifelong master class.
We are the people of the book, and this is the book.
We received it thousands and thousands of weeks ago.

Before we understood how to separate milk from meat.
Before Ruth went where she went.
Before we even knew what a blintz was.

We’ll do this again in an appropriate number of weeks.
I wouldn’t plan on getting any sleep tonight.
There’s too much to know.

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 27 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 Low Country Shvitz” (Poems written in Georgia and the Carolinas – Ain’t Got No Press, May 2023) 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.