We All Make Mistakes – A poem for Parsha Shoftim

As when a man goes with his fellow into the forest to chop wood, and his hand swings the ax to cut down the tree, and the iron flies off the handle, and it reaches his fellow, and he dies he shall flee to one of these cities, and live.
          Deuteronomy 19:5

We all make mistakes.
We’ve stepped out off of the curb
without having looked both ways
and almost got our leg driven off.

We’ve clicked Send on an email before
properly vetting all the red-underlined
words sending a mishmash of English
to an unsuspecting email reader.

I’m pretty sure I’ve brought home
a cantaloupe when a honeydew
was what was asked for. (Though
to be fair, the list just said melon.)
My wife has no memory of this
but we both know I’ve come home
with the wrong thing, even if it
wasn’t melon.

I don’t think I’ve chopped wood
since Boy Scouts Camp in the
Adirondack Mountains in the
middle of the eighties, so I
personally have never had an
axe handle fly off and unintentionally
kill someone else. (Though I did
leave the fishing pole by the lake
instead of putting it away which
my scoutmaster was disappointed with
and then suggested they should take
my fishing merit badge away.)

We all miss the mark. This is half the reason
Australia was invented…a separate place
for mistake-makers to go to think about
what they’ve done. A kindness, almost,
compared to the harshest consequences.

Almost every transgression, back in
the days of Moses, led to a smiting.
It’s nice they built in our very own Australia
for the accidental murderers to go.

This is when we set all this up.
This is when all the laws
were written down.

Rick Lupert, a poet, songleader and graphic designer, is the author of 27 books including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion.”