Inequitable suffering canvases the earth.
Multitudes starved for a drop of the stream
That flows through distant shower-heads.
Children slaughtered for emerging
From off-color wombs.

Can there be One both powerful and good?

Unjust suffering spreads unbearably broad
Across the masses
Yet curiously penetrates no deeper
Than every one man,
For it has no power to persist
Past the body’s capacity to prevail;

At such an hour—
Through the unjust suffering of One
Who withheld his power
And held to a cup
That drained him of all things good—
Each man’s is rendered fully removed
Or fully just.

Who do you say I am?
Cries the self-proclaimed savior.
Not to the masses but to italicized you.

And so it goes for grace,
It is not diluted
Like a rival good among the masses.
For upon no larger a canvas than every one soul
Are his full mercies wholly soaked.

© Tanner Rinke 2015