Psalm Of The Unborn by Jeff Callaway

Psalm Of The Unborn 

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and revenge our blood?" — Revelation 6:9-10

We are not a position. 

We are not a debate.

We were knit together in the secret place, the dark holy chamber where God does His best work and no campaign contribution can reach,

and then somebody decided we were a choice.

Say the number aloud.

Seventy-three million.

Every year. Every calendar year since someone decided convenience outranks the image of God.

Two hundred thousand a day. Not soldiers. Not criminals. Not the old and spent.

Children.

Each one arriving in eternity before the first breath ever came — each one carrying unique DNA from the very moment the cell divided, a code no one has ever carried before, a code no one will ever carry again, a person compressed into a declaration the world refused to read.

Sixty-six million in America alone since nineteen seventy-three. Sixty-six million Americans who never failed at anything, who never disappointed anyone, who never got the chance to be ordinary.

Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee.

God said that. Not the Church. Not the pro-life lobby. Not a man with a sign on a street corner.

God.

To Jeremiah. Before there was a Republic. Before there was a Constitution. Before there was a Supreme Court deciding in a windowless chamber which humans qualify as human.

He knew us.

And the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not stammer at this — paragraph two thousand two hundred seventy stands like a granite wall against the tide:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.

Absolutely.

Not after the second trimester. Not after viability. Not after the paperwork clears.

The word is absolute. And the Church does not take it back because the culture got uncomfortable.

Twenty-two days after fertilization, the heart begins its work. Twenty-two days.

Most mothers do not yet know. Most fathers have already walked. Most clinics have not yet scheduled the appointment that will stop it.

And the heart is beating. The embryology textbooks say so — cardiac activity, electrical signal, the primitive chambers contracting, blood moving through a body that the culture has not yet decided deserves the name.

Call it what you will. Argue the terminology. Debate the valves.

God called it a child before the chromosomes finished sorting themselves out.

And when that signal stops — not by natural cause, not by the mercy of disease, not by the sovereign hand of God, but by a tool, by a chemical, by a decision made in a clinic on a Tuesday —

something goes silent that was not silent before.

You want to know what silence feels like?

Ask the woman who believed them when they said it was nothing.

Ask her at two in the morning, ten years later, when the nothing has a face in her dreams, has a birthday she cannot forget, has a name she gave it only after it was gone.

They called it healthcare. They called it liberation. They handed her a lie wrapped in clinical language and called it compassion.

And when she wept afterward — and she wept — nobody at the clinic called to check on her.

I am not condemning her. The Church is not here to stone her. The Church is here to weep with her, to say the word she cannot say, to hold the grief that has no legal name, and to offer her the same mercy given to every broken person who ever stumbled to the feet of Christ.

But the system that sold her the lie — that system stands before a different accounting.

---

God heard Abel's blood from the ground.

One man. One murdered brother. And the earth opened its mouth and testified to Heaven.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth.

He heard that. From one.

What is the earth carrying now with sixty-six million voices pressed beneath American soil?

What is the sky holding that it cannot release?

What sound is rising from seventy-three million every year, every year, every year — louder than Hiroshima, louder than the gulag, louder than every war this blood-soaked century has made — a sound most of us have learned the fine art of not hearing?

The martyrs under the altar in Revelation did not lie in dignified silence.

They cried.

They demanded justice the way the poor always demand justice when the powerful have perfected the art of looking away.

How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and revenge our blood?

And we are that cry.

Not the metaphor of that cry. The thing itself.

Thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast protected me from my mother's womb.

David wrote that. David, who had blood on his own hands, who knew the weight of destroying life, who came before God broken and found Him anyway.

That is the Psalm one hundred thirty-nine that nobody reads at the prayer breakfast when the donors are in the room.

The one that says God was present in the forming, in the weaving, in the hiddenness before the world got a vote.

He was there.

And He is here.

Not wringing His hands in some distant and indifferent sky.

Here.

Weighing. Remembering. Keeping every account that the culture has decided does not need to be kept.

I am writing this as a man who has no right to be clean.

I am writing it because the pulpits went soft and the politicians went bought and the people in the pews learned to keep their hands folded and their mouths shut and their vote leveraged for a tax cut.

I am writing it because it is not enough to be right on Sunday and silent all week.

Because the blood calls for something more inconvenient than a position.

It calls for the woman at the crisis center who gives her Saturday.

It calls for the man who stays when staying is the harder thing.

It calls for the Church that does not merely preach against the killing but builds the table wide enough for the mother in crisis and the father running scared and the woman ten years out who cannot say the word but needs to say it.

The Catechism calls this culture of death by name — paragraph two thousand two hundred seventy-one:

This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.

Unchangeable.

Not trending. Not evolving. Not subject to revision because a generation found it inconvenient.

Lord, we have made altars to ourselves and filled them with our children.

Lord, the earth is holding what we will not carry.

Lord, the silence has a sound and it sounds like two hundred thousand a day and we have learned to sleep through it and I am not sure how we sleep through it and I am not sure we are meant to.

How long, O Lord.

How long before the accounts are opened. How long before the ground gives up what it has been carrying. How long before the ones under the altar receive the answer they were promised.

We are not a debate.

We were twenty-two days from a heartbeat. We were nine months from a name. We were a lifetime from everything we were made to become.

And we are under the altar.

And our blood still has a voice.

And God has never once in all of human history failed to hear it.

Lord, how long.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

© 2026 Texas Outlaw Press

https://texasoutlawpress.org