1
My father would halt me
by looking over his half-glasses
and precisely intoning:
"Life is not fair,"
a statement falling somewhere
between actuality and pathological avoidance.

2
Already aware of the unfairnness of life,
I wasn't looking for him to repair it,
simply to acknowledge it–
not the lack of fairness, per se,
but the bitterness of it, the ache.

3
And then there were the occasions
when he failed to explain
how life's unfairness
justified his own.

4
God's generosity eclipses fairness.
God is supremely, gloriously unfair.
The words fair and unfair
have never been entries
in the dictionary of the divine.

Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.