The Poet Who Put God on Trial
On Mulugeta Tesfaye, the suffering of the innocent, and a question heaven could not silence.
There are people who spend their lives searching for God. And then there are those who, having searched, dare to ask why He remains silent.
Mulugeta Tesfaye, affectionately known as Aya Mule, was one such voice a poet who turned the language of faith into a question of justice, and a question of justice into an indictment of heaven.
An Ethiopian poet, lyricist, and restless intellectual, Mulugeta is remembered not only for his words but also for stories of extraordinary generosity. One account tells of him giving his shoes to a barefoot stranger and continuing his journey barefoot himself. Other recollections portray a man willing to relinquish comfort and privilege rather than live against his convictions. Such stories deserve careful verification, but they point toward a striking possibility: Mulugeta did not regard philosophy as something to be admired from a distance. He believed, or at least seemed to live as though, another person’s suffering demanded a response.
That same restlessness burns through his Amharic poem, “እውነት ከመንበርህ የለህማ!” — a title that may be translated as “Are You Truly Absent from Your Throne?”
The poem begins in the shadow of one of humanity’s oldest questions: if God is just and merciful, why must the innocent suffer?
But Mulugeta does not approach this question through abstract theology. He brings it home to the hungry, the exhausted farmer, the mother whose body can no longer nourish her child, and the child who has done nothing to deserve the world into which it was born.
His poem is not content to observe suffering. It demands an explanation.
“ግን … ብላቴናዎች ምን በደሉ?”
But what wrong have the children committed?
The force of this question lies in its terrible simplicity. What crime can belong to a newborn? What debt could a child owe a world it has barely entered? What kind of justice allows the innocent to suffer before they have even had the chance to choose who they will become?
There is no easy answer. That is precisely why the question matters.
For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and writers have wrestled with the problem of innocent suffering. The biblical Job demands an explanation from God. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, confronts the moral horror of a world in which children’s suffering threatens every comfortable justification of divine harmony. Albert Camus, facing an apparently indifferent universe, asks how human beings might live with dignity without pretending that suffering makes sense.
Mulugeta enters this long conversation, but he speaks from a distinctly Ethiopian experience. His landscape is not a European philosophical salon. It is the countryside, where drought can turn labour into dust, where hunger enters the home, and where a mother’s love cannot always overcome the limits imposed by poverty and circumstance.
His voice carries the urgency of someone who cannot accept that suffering should simply be endured because it has always existed.
Then the refrain returns:
“እውነት … እውነት ከመንበርህ የለህማ!”
Are You truly absent from Your throne?
Notice what the poet dares to do. He addresses God not merely as a believer seeking comfort, but as a witness demanding accountability. The throne becomes a symbol of authority, and authority must answer for the world beneath it.
Get Tina Belay’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This is what makes the poem so unsettling. Mulugeta does not simply ask whether God exists. He asks what divine goodness means when mercy appears absent. He places faith and suffering in the same room and refuses to let either leave without an answer.
In his hands, prayer becomes protest. Devotion becomes confrontation. The language traditionally used to praise heaven becomes the language through which heaven is questioned.
Yet perhaps the most compelling tension emerges when we place the poem beside the stories told about the poet himself.
The man who questioned heaven’s silence was remembered, in at least one account, as someone who could not walk past a barefoot stranger without responding. He could not end famine. He could not answer every child’s cry. He could not repair the world’s injustices through poetry alone. But he could give away a pair of shoes.
If that story is true, it offers no solution to the problem of suffering. It offers something smaller, and perhaps more demanding: a refusal to treat another person’s pain as somebody else’s responsibility.
We often ask why God does not intervene. Mulugeta’s poem forces us to sit with that question. His remembered generosity invites another: when suffering is within our reach, why do we so often fail to intervene ourselves?
This does not resolve the tension between faith and injustice. Nor should it. Some questions must remain uncomfortable if they are to remain honest.
Mulugeta Tesfaye died in 2004, but the question in his poem has not aged. It belongs to every era in which children suffer, hunger persists, and people search for meaning in a world that does not always reward goodness.
“What wrong have the children committed?”
Perhaps the question is not only theological. It is political, moral, and deeply human. It asks what kind of society we have built, what suffering we have accepted as inevitable, and whose pain we have learned to ignore.
Perhaps the ultimate indictment is not that God has abandoned His throne, but that humanity has abandoned its own.
And perhaps the measure of our faith, our philosophy, or our humanity is not how eloquently we explain suffering — but what we do when we encounter it.
Author’s Note
I encountered Mulugeta Tesfaye’s poetry as more than a literary work. I encountered a question that refuses to grow old: what does justice mean in a world where the innocent suffer?
Writing about Aya Mule is an attempt to bring his voice into conversation with readers beyond Ethiopia — not to explain away his questions, but to let them travel. His poem reminds us that literature can be an act of courage: it can challenge authority, confront silence, and give language to grief that might otherwise remain unheard.
The English translations in this essay are interpretive renderings of selected Amharic lines. They aim to preserve the spirit of the poem rather than claim the authority of a definitive translation.
Sources & Further Reading
Mulugeta Tesfaye, “እውነት ከመንበርህ የለህማ!” — Amharic text of the poem reproduced by Freedom4Ethiopian (April 22, 2015). Read the poem.
“እውነት ከመንበርህ የለህማ! ሙሉጌታ ተስፋዬ” — Sheger Tribune (February 14, 2014), another online reproduction of the poem. Read here.
“የባለቅኔው ኑዛዜ” — A biographical collection associated with Mulugeta Tesfaye, catalogued as a 2008 E.C. publication (2016 Gregorian calendar), with Fasika Kebede listed as author and Mulugeta Tesfaye as the subject. View the catalogue record.
“Aya Mule | Mulugeta Tesfaye | Endale Geta Kebede” — YENAT GOJO ENTERTAINMENT, a recording featuring the poem, published October 17, 2022. Listen on YouTube.
