A Psalm Over Minab by Jeff Callaway

A Psalm Over Minab

(For the 175 Children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh School — The Good Tree That Was Cut Down)

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not." — Jeremiah 31:15, Douay-Rheims

I. THE MORNING

It was a Saturday.

In Iran, Saturday is a school day.

At 10:23 in the morning, the girls of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school — which means The Good Tree, Lord, The Good Tree — were in their classrooms in the southern city of Minab, seven-year-olds and twelve-year-olds with notebooks and pencils and the whole ordinary holiness of a morning not yet ruined, and the roof above them was painted with pink flowers and green leaves, because someone once believed children deserved beauty on a Tuesday, on a Thursday, on a Saturday in February —

and then the sky opened and the most expensive military machine in the history of human civilization

sent the first one down.

CHARGE THE FIRST — THE STRIKE

Lord God, I am not going to dress this up for You.

You were there. You saw it. You see everything, and so You already know that the Tomahawk missile that passed through the roof of that school — identified by weapons experts, corroborated by satellite, confirmed in the classified preliminary report of the very military that fired it — was not a stray round and not a ghost. It was a precision-guided instrument. It went exactly where it was aimed. And it went there while one hundred and seventy-five children were inside.

The Church I belong to — the Church You founded on the rock of Peter — says this plainly in paragraph 2314:

Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.

I am here to give that condemnation a voice. I am here because someone has to say it plainly and without the comfort of euphemism or the cowardice of both-sides-ism or the tranquilizer of strategic patience.

One hundred and seventy-five children, Lord.

One hundred and seventy-five.

CHARGE THE SECOND — THE PRINCIPAL

After the first strike, a woman — her name I do not know, You know it, write it in Your book — the principal of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school gathered the children who were still breathing and moved them to the prayer room.

I want You to sit with that for a moment, Lord.

She moved them to the prayer room.

She called their parents. The school is hit, she said. Come get your children. Come now.

And while the fathers were leaving their houses, while the mothers were laying down their work and running — the second missile came.

It hit the prayer room.

It killed most of the children who had survived the first.

That is not collateral damage.

That is not the fog of war.

The Church calls it — in CCC 2313 — a crime. The orders that command such actions are crimes. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out.

I am asking You, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of the weeping woman at the Cross, God who said Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for the kingdom of heaven is for such — I am asking You who see every sparrow fall — how do You withhold Your hand while a second missile finds a prayer room full of dying seven-year-olds?

I know You are not required to answer me.

I am asking anyway.

Because David asked. Because Jeremiah asked. Because Job asked from the ash heap and You did not strike him down for asking.

So I ask.

INTERLUDE — THE FATHERS

There are fathers in Minab, Iran tonight who will never be the same.

They are not enemies of America. They are not soldiers of the Revolutionary Guard. They are fathers. They got a phone call that morning that said come get your daughter and they got in their cars or they ran on foot and when they arrived at the school the security forces were pushing them back — pushing them back because the targeting systems that had already killed their children once were calculating whether to kill them again — and they stood on the other side of that barrier and listened to the rubble breathe.

Some of them heard voices underneath it.

I do not know what a man does with that.

I know what David did. He tore his clothes and he cried out to God in language so raw that it frightened the scribes who copied it. He asked the Lord to arise. He asked the Lord not to forget the humble. He said: Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why dost thou look away in time of trouble? (Psalm 9:22, Douay-Rheims)

I ask it now on behalf of every man who pressed against that perimeter while his child died under American steel.

CHARGE THE THIRD — THE CLINIC

The clinic was bombed too.

The Martyr Absalan Clinic — the one the medics ran to, the one the wounded were being rushed toward — was bombed after the school.

This is what the military calls a double-tap. You hit the target. You wait for the rescue. You hit it again.

International law calls it a war crime.

God calls it an abomination.

I call it what it is: the deliberate, systematic murder of people whose only crime was proximity to a military coordinate that the targeting intelligence had not updated since 2016 — since before some of these children were born.

The satellite imagery showing a soccer pitch in that schoolyard. The separate gate. The separate wall. The separate street entrance built so that children could enter without passing through a military compound. The playground visible from space. All of it there. All of it available to anyone with the technology to read it.

And that technology exists. And it was being used that morning.

And someone aimed at the school anyway.

Lord, the Church teaches in CCC 2307 that the fifth commandment forbids the intentional destruction of human life. I know the men in Washington who ordered this will stand before microphones and say they never intended to hit a school. Let them explain the second strike, then. Let them explain the third. Let them explain why the clinic that took the wounded was reduced to rubble before the blood dried.

Let them explain it to You. Because they will not explain it to us.

THE INDICTMENT OF SILENCE

And now I turn my face to this nation. To this republic. To this people who call themselves a Christian nation and put it on their currency and say it at their rallies and wave their flags at their megachurches and have not — in the three weeks since one hundred and seventy-five children were pulled from the rubble of Minab — have not torn their clothes, have not put on sackcloth, have not demanded in the streets that someone be held to account.

Both parties.

Let me be clear. This is not a partisan indictment.

The Republicans voted for the war and call anyone who questions it a traitor to Israel.

The Democrats signed a letter — a letter — and then went home.

One hundred and twenty of them asked for answers.

They did not shut the government down.

They did not stand in the well of the Senate and read the children's names.

They asked for answers and waited to be answered and they have not been answered because no one in power intends to answer.

Isaiah knew these men. He wrote them down in the tenth chapter: Woe to them that make wicked laws, and when they write, write injustice: To oppress the poor in judgment, and do violence to the cause of the humble of my people. (Isaias 10:1-2, Douay-Rheims)

Woe.

That word is not a suggestion.

THE HOLY INNOCENTS

I place these children — these Iranian Muslim children who died in a prayer room on a Saturday morning — I place them beside the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem.

I know that is not politically safe.

I do not care what is politically safe.

Herod killed the children of Bethlehem not because of who those children were but because of where they were — because they occupied the same geography as a threat to his power. And the Church names those children martyrs. The Church gives them a feast day. The Church weeps for them across twenty centuries without qualification and without asterisk.

These children of Minab were killed not because of who they were but because of where they were — because they occupied the same geography as a missile coordinate that someone in a command center decided was worth a Tomahawk at 10:23 in the morning.

I do not know their names.

You know their names.

And the Church that says every human person is made in the image and likeness of God — CCC 357 — cannot confine that image to one nation's flag or one religion's confession. The image of God does not carry a passport. It does not require a baptismal certificate to be inviolable.

These children bore the image of God.

They were destroyed by men who knew better and did it anyway.

THE PRAYER — UNGLAMOROUS AND UNRESOLVED

Father,

I am not a prophet. I am a sinner from East Texas who converted to Your Church after decades of running from it, and I do not have the standing to demand things from heaven. I know that.

But Proverbs says: Open thy mouth for the dumb, and for the causes of all the children that pass. (Proverbs 31:8, Douay-Rheims)

So I open my mouth.

Forgive this nation, Lord. Not because it deserves it — it does not — but because You are God and mercy is Your nature even when justice is Your demand. Forgive us for the children of Minab. Forgive us for the silence that followed. Forgive us for the press briefings and the non-answers and the investigations that will find nothing because nothing is meant to be found. Forgive us for a political culture so broken that the death of a hundred and ten schoolchildren produces a letter and not a reckoning.

And hold accountable, Lord — by whatever means Your justice requires in whatever time Your providence appoints — hold accountable the men who authorized three strikes on a building painted with flowers. Hold accountable the man who stood at the microphone and said we never target civilians while the graves were still being dug in Minab. Hold accountable the silence that is complicity and the complicity that is sin and the sin that compounds upon sin until the blood of children cries up from the ground the way Abel's blood cried to You before there was even a nation on the earth to bear the guilt.

The souls under the altar in the Revelation of Saint John cried out: How long, O Lord (holy and true), dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Revelation 6:10, Douay-Rheims)

I echo it.

Not in hatred.

In grief.

In the grief that is the only honest response to a prayer room full of dead children in southern Iran on a Saturday morning in the year of Our Lord 2026.

CODA — TO THE CHILDREN

I do not know your names.

But God does.

And God who knows the number of hairs on every head and the fall of every sparrow in every sky over every nation — that God received you on the morning of February 28th, and whatever the theology of your faith and ours, whatever the distance between Minab and Bethlehem, you were children, and He said of such is the kingdom of heaven, and I choose to believe He meant it without exception and without condition.

You went to school on a Saturday.

The building was painted with pink flowers and green leaves.

Someone built you a soccer pitch.

Someone loved you.

Go in peace.

The rest of us have to live here.

And answer for this.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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