Grace Forfeited: Adam, Tamerlan, and the Lady

Below is a first for WORLDmag.com but a new start of an old tradition in American journalism: the news poem. Hardly a vile murder or a military victory went by without colonial poets bemoaning or celebrating the occasion in verse, with the work then published on a single page “broadside” and sold for a penny. Happily, my favorite pastor/theologian, John Piper, is also a poet, and below are his thoughts on justice in regard to Connecticut’s school shooting and Boston’s Marathon bombing. —Marvin Olasky

Grace Forfeited Adam, Tamerlan, and the Lady

Was Adam Lanza’s bullet to the head, With all its millisecond length of dread And suffering, a fitting recompense For twenty children dead?

And the events Of Boston’s bloody marathon—is one Hour’s bullet-riddled dying how it’s done? Is that the penalty for killing three, And ripping off our legs, as if a knee Could run?

Can Tamerlan and Adam rob So easily the State of its last job Of punishing these crimes?

Perhaps. But not The Lady Justice. No. In truth she got Her verdict. Firm. And she is not so blind That any criminal, by her consigned To suffer suitably, could ever slip Away through merest mortal stings, or skip Her perfect rectitude through suicide.

Nor is her Ladyship so dignified Among the cynical elite that she Would bow to their philosophy, And lose her right to judge—her sacred breath— By not, at last, existing after death.

As if this bloody universe were one Long empty triumph of injustice, done By no one, leaping into nothingness From dreams, where there is nothing to transgress.

No. Those last pistol pops in Sandy Hook And Watertown pursued and overtook Their prey, and echoed like a slamming door, Heard on the other side of time, and tore Away the fatal hope that they were dead. They were not dead. Nor she, enflaming dread. In her right hand the Lady held the chains, And in her left the everlasting pains.

—John Piper, May 8, 2013