The innocents

Surely God must be there somewhere?
In the quiet midday rubble?
So many children killed
weren't killed for no reason?
It must be because God was among them?

Surely the endless daily routine of pain
and fear and loss and grief and dusty pallor
that suffocates and erases their childhood
is because our rulers heard a rumour somewhere?

Surely shrapnel pierces limbs
and phosphorus burns flesh
and rubble is heaped upon bodies
because our rulers have somewhere heard a rumour,
have a dossier somewhere that describes in detail,
that God is somehow, somewhere among them,
as Herod found out, long ago,
and are exhausting the sum of Man's futile strength,
calling in every air-strike, dropping every bomb,
in jealousy and rage against Him
while we sit safe at home bathed in TV light,
entertained by the tedious percussion of foreign wars?

Is God now a refugee?
Following weary parents
on the long low road to foreign lands
to be greeted with suspicion and denigration
as happened long ago in Bethlehem and Egypt?
Do we turn God away at Yarmouk and Calais?
Do we spit on God and call Him names?

Or have we managed to kill God at last,
relentlessly pursuing Herod's mission to completion,
leaving us with nothing but dead children?

Have we now become the angel of death,
no longer following some divine plan,
not passing over, but unconstrained
except by earthly dictates, flexing air-forces
in ineffective, indiscriminate, macho gestures?

Surely God must be there somewhere?

Please let God be there somewhere.