Michael Shepherd - ! ' How can God allow this...? '

The cry goes up…
making atheists out of believers,
believers out of atheists…

The answer offered from the wise
or wiser, is
God granted Man freewill…
without qualification…

so couldn’t He have arranged
that we could commit suicide,
but not murder? Wouldn’t that
be fairer…?

Seems not – He has to keep
by His own rules; those same inexorable rules
that allow a single tyrant
to bring down a whole nation -
do we dare say: with its own consent?

And man seeks to rule his fellows’ lives
by some shadow of that divinely ordained law:
granting to us, in some countries, though not all,
the right to carry arms… that gun
we carry ‘for our own defence’;
we who cannot all defend ourselves
against our own impulses;
we who defend the right
to portray murder without limit on our screens…
as if to see it acted out, still preserves, maintains,
even asserts, our innocence…
we, too, dispense freewill..
and call it ‘rights’…

the solemn bells ring deep and slow;
pause; say nothing; remember; learn.

Michael Shepherd

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-can-god-allow-this/