The child is dead.
The earth drank down her cries,
a final, gurgling sigh the rain-washed street
absorbs without a tremor. Overhead,
the sky’s vast, stupid blue observes it all.
And in the chapel, polished, hushed, and sweet,
with candlelight and lilies, voices rise
to praise a hidden calculus, a seat
of judgement that we must, in faith, call good.
But I have counted up the sum of things
in the long ledger of the fever-ward.
I’ve watched the cancer eat a mother’s brain
while prayer groups knit soft blankets in the narthex.
I’ve seen the famine’s arithmetic: the cost
of grain is weighed against a toddler’s weight.
And in the silence that these horrors bring,
a question forms, a serpent in the orchard.
Is God willing to prevent this evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent. So let us speak it plain:
he is a crippled king, a well-meaning fable,
a gardener with blight upon his grain.
His arm is short, his vision clouded, weak.
He meant the world for joy, but lost the reins.
We build our cathedrals to a divine antique,
a wounded watchmaker bound in his own chains.
To such a god, I owe no awe---but grief,
a fellow-sufferer, stumbling, blind, and brief.
Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent.
Then he is not a father, but a fiend.
He sits above carnage, complacent and excellent,
and watches while the mechanisms grind.
He could divert the bullet, still the gas,
un-make the tumor with a single thought,
but finds a reason in the suffering class---
some “greater good” that must be dearly bought.
A god who holds the cure and turns his head,
who has the power, but lets the child drop dead,
is not a being to be loved or praised,
but one to be defied, with fist upraised.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Then from himself! The logic is complete.
He is the author, then, the prime and primal
architect of every burning street.
He writes the script of **** of war, of bone
that grinds to dust beneath the tank’s slow tread.
He is the silence in the frantic phone,
the final, whispered prayer beside the bed.
If he is both, then evil is his art,
a masterpiece of agony, his “plan.”
And worship is the most obscene of parts
we play for a celestial tyrant-man.
Then call him not the Good, but call him Might,
a demon enthroned in uncreated light.
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Why waste the breath on such a hollow name?
A phantom in the sky, a charming fraud,
a useless idol, useless to proclaim.
He is a portrait hung in vacant air,
a comfort for the fearful and the tame,
a cosmic shrug, a silence in the square
where mothers shriek and children end in flame.
To such a vacancy, I owe no prayer,
no fear, no love, no loyalty, no aim.
He is a zero, an absence, a lost cause,
a final, disappointing, hollow pause.
So let the church bells ring their sweet deceit,
the incense rise to veil the bitter truth.
I stand amid the ashes and the sleet
of this world’s unrelenting, brutal proof.
No god I’d deem worth naming, much less kneeling,
would let a single sparrow fall in vain.
If power and compassion both are wanting
in the one who claims to hold the sun and rain,
then let the final, honest epitaph be:
I will not kiss the hand that holds the knife.
I will not trade my outrage for a half-
truth dressed in robes, to buy a quiet life.
The silence of the heavens is not love.
It is an empty throne, far, far above.