Where We Can't Go

Where we can't go,
When we don't know
What is happening
But O! God, thou
A girl gets raped,
A child gets molested,
The innocent draped
In wounds uncontested.

Where art thou hiding
Behind which cloud?
Is the thunder riding
Too muffled, too loud
For you to hear
The sob of a child
That singular fear
So savage, so wild?

We built you in stone,
In marble, in gold,
We gave you a throne
In stories retold.
We lit you a candle,
We rang you a bell
Was that not a signal
Of the fires of hell
Breaking through skin
Of the ones you made?
Was that not a hymn
You were being paid?

They say you are water,
They say you are wind,
Then why does the slaughter
Of the unoffending
Not ripple your surface,
Not shake your still air?
What deeper purpose
Lives under despair?

Or are you the question
We keep asking wrong?
A divine suggestion
We've mistaken for song?
Do you live in the aching
That follows the crime
In the slow, painstaking
Rebuilding of time?

Because she is still breathing,
Though barely tonight.
Because something is seething
In her; still a light,
Dim as a matchstick
In a cathedral of dark,
But burning, still burning;
Is “that” where you are?

Are you not the answer
But the marrow of pain,
The reluctant dancer
In each grief-soaked refrain?
Then why must we find you
So deep in the wound?
Why must we go blind to
The surface, the sound,
The obvious crying
Of the ones in the street,
Before you start trying
To make the heart beat?

We are not angry;
No, we are just tired.
We are just hungry
For a sign, uninspired
By the silence that follows
Each scream in the night,
The theological hollows
Where you used to give light.

Do you sleep when we sleep?
Do you close what we close?
Do you keep what we keep
This not-knowing that grows
Into something too heavy
For two human hands?
Are you also unready
For what this world demands?

Why do rivers keep flowing
While the small body lies still?
Why does the morning keep showing
Indifferent and shrill
The same sun, the same sparrow,
The same unbothered blue sky,
While something so narrow
As a child's last cry
Dissolves in the atmosphere,
Unarchived, unrecorded?
Does heaven have ears
For the ones who were not afforded
Even one moment
Of someone who came?

Is this the atonement
For some ancient blame?
Are we all paying interest
On a debt we don't own?
Because the littlest, the quietest,
Are paying alone.

Tell us, not in thunder,
Not in burning bush light
Tell us in the wonder
Of one rescued night.
Tell us in the trembling
Of one hand that held
Another; resembling
Something, some old,
Half-remembered promise
You may have whispered
Before the world's onset,
Before we were fractured.

We are not asking
For a parting of seas.
We are only asking
Are you there? If you please.

Just once. Just slightly.
Just enough to suggest
That the ones screaming nightly
Are not screaming at rest.

Where we can't go,
When we don't know
O, God, thou who “could”
Why don't you show?