Psalm Over Gaza — Ashes Where Children Played by Jeff Callaway

Psalm Over Gaza — Ashes Where Children Played

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth." — Genesis 4:10, Douay-Rheims

Lord God of Armies, Lord God of the Poor, Lord God who parted the sea and fed the hungry with bread no man baked, are You watching this?

Because we are watching it.

The whole screaming world is watching it and calling it foreign policy.

WHAT THE RUBBLE HOLDS

Three hundred fifty pages. The first three hundred fifty pages of the death registry of Gaza are nothing but children. Names without futures. Faces that will never know the particular mercy of old age. Children under sixteen filling up the front of the book like some monstrous alphabetical prayer no saint ever taught us to pray.

More than twenty thousand children.

One child killed every hour for two years running.

Lord, do You hear it? The arithmetic of it? A whole classroom of children dead every single day for seven hundred days?

UNICEF said it. The Lancet confirmed it. The Max Planck Institute ran the numbers and found the violent deaths in Gaza between one hundred thousand and one hundred twenty-six thousand souls — and twenty-seven percent of those were children under fifteen years old.

We are not speaking of collateral damage. We are speaking of the systematic ending of small lives.

And the nations who sent the bombs called it self-defense and went home to their dinners.

WHAT STARVATION LOOKS LIKE IN A CHILD

Lord God of Elijah fed by ravens in the desert, Lord God who multiplied the loaves so nobody would go home hungry —

one child in four in Gaza is now acutely malnourished. One in five babies born underweight. One in five babies arriving already hungry into a world that has decided they do not matter as much as a geopolitical alliance.

The International Criminal Court — not a prophet, not a bishop, not a poet from Texas — the cold institutional law of nations looked at the evidence and found reasonable grounds to believe that starvation was used as a method of warfare.

That is not an accusation from the angry. That is a legal finding.

The warrants say: Netanyahu and his Defense Minister deliberately deprived the civilian population of Gaza of food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity, connecting the halt of essential goods to the goals of war — the court's own language — connecting the halt of essential goods to the goals of war.

They starved the children on purpose.

"Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee." — Isaias 49:15, Douay-Rheims

God does not forget. But the nations have forgotten. One hundred twenty-four member states of the ICC are required by treaty to arrest Netanyahu if he enters their territory. Most of them have found ways and means to make sure he stays comfortable.

Hungary invited him. Germany said it would find workarounds. France cited head-of-state immunity. The United States is not even a member of the court.

The warrant is paper. The children are ash.

WHAT POPE LEO SAID

The world can't take it anymore.

Those were his words. Not a revolutionary's words. Not a protest chant. The words of the Vicar of Christ, the first American pope, speaking from the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo after Israeli tank fire hit the only Catholic church left standing in Gaza — the Holy Family Parish, where six hundred displaced souls were sheltering — and killed three Christians by name:

Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh. Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad. Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud.

Three people God knew by name before they were born. Dead now from shrapnel in a church.

Pope Leo called it barbarity. Catechism paragraph 2314 calls it a crime against God and man: "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants merits firm and unequivocal condemnation."

Not polite concern. Condemnation. Firm and unequivocal.

And before him, Pope Francis — who called the pastor of that same church every night at seven in the evening for over a year, just to say you are not forgotten, I am here, I hear you — Francis called for an investigation into genocide and died in the spring of 2025 still crying out over what the world refused to stop.

The shepherds have spoken. The Church has spoken. Two thousand years of just war doctrine has spoken.

"The Lord is the God of revenges: the God of revenges hath acted freely. Be thou exalted, thou that judgest the earth: render a reward to the proud." — Psalm 93:1-2, Douay-Rheims

WHAT THE NATIONS CALLED POLICY

Here is what I will not do: I will not drape this psalm in the colors of any flag. I will not hand it to a party or a think tank or a cable news network that needs it to mean something it was not born to mean.

Hamas murdered twelve hundred people on October 7, 2023. Mostly civilians. Two hundred fifty-one taken hostage. That was a crime against God and man, and I will not soften it.

But the answer to that crime was not to kill one hundred thousand people. The answer to that crime was not to starve a million children until their bodies forgot what full felt like. The answer to that crime was not to level seventy-eight percent of every structure in Gaza until the word neighborhood lost all its meaning.

"Thou shalt not kill" is not a conditional commandment. It does not say unless the politics are complicated. It does not say unless the lobby is powerful enough. It does not say unless your allies are supplying the munitions and calling it foreign assistance.

The United States sent the bombs. The United States blocked ceasefire resolutions. The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court and therefore accountable to no international law it doesn't want to honor.

I am an American. I am a Texas Catholic. I am saying this out loud because my politics are Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ wept over Jerusalem and drove the money changers out of the temple and said whatsoever you do to the least of these you do unto Me.

The least of these.

The least of these had a name that took up the first three hundred fifty pages of a registry no one in power wanted to read.

THE IMPRECATION

O Lord, God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, God of the Psalms written by a man who knew war and blood and grief, God who did not spare Pharaoh when the cry of the slaves rose up to heaven, God who said through the prophet Amos —

"I will not receive your holocausts... Take away from me the tumult of thy songs: and I will not hear the canticles of thy harp. But judgment shall be revealed as water, and justice as a mighty torrent." — Amos 5:22-24, Douay-Rheims

Then let it come as a torrent.

I am calling on Your justice now, not the justice of the Hague where warrants sit on desks while children starve —

Your justice. The justice that parted the Red Sea and drowned the army of the arrogant. The justice that brought Babylon low. The justice that said through Isaiah, "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 to the architect of starvation. Woe to the diplomat who handed over the bombs and called it strategic partnership. Woe to the senator and the prime minister and the defense minister and every man in a suit who looked at a registry full of children's names and calculated whether it was politically expedient to care.

I am not asking for violence. I am asking for the fire of God's truth to fall on the powerful the way truth always falls on the powerful when the poor have been ground into the earth long enough.

The saints knew this fire. Ambrose rebuked the emperor Theodosius for the massacre at Thessalonica and the emperor did penance in the snow. John Chrysostom said the rich man sins not only by taking what is not his but by failing to share what he has while his neighbor starves. What would Chrysostom say now watching F-16s paid for with American tax dollars drop bombs on camps full of displaced children?

He would say what I am saying.

He would say what the Church has always said when she was not afraid: this is wrong, this is a sin, this is a crime against God and man, and the silence of the powerful is participation in the crime.

"If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." — Psalm 65:18, Douay-Rheims

So I will not hold the iniquity in my heart. I will not be quiet. I will not sanitize this psalm for the comfort of people who profit from the silence.

THE CRY THAT WILL NOT BE BURIED

Forty-one thousand eight hundred forty children killed or maimed just in the first two years.

One thousand babies.

A thousand babies.

A thousand babies who had not yet learned to speak or walk or know their own name dead now in a strip of land the size of Philadelphia that the world has decided is expendable.

"For he shall deliver the poor from the mighty: and the needy that had no helper. He shall spare the poor and needy: and he shall save the souls of the poor. He shall redeem their souls from usuries and iniquity: and their names shall be honourable in his sight." — Psalm 71:12-14, Douay-Rheims

Their names shall be honourable in His sight.

Not in the sight of the Security Council. Not in the sight of the man who calculated how many civilians could be killed per low-ranking militant and set the number at fifteen. Not in the sight of the television commentators who say well, it's complicated.

In His sight. In the sight of the God who numbered the hairs on every head including the heads that are now under the rubble.

WHAT WE OWE THE DEAD

We owe them our voice. We owe them our refusal to call what happened here by any comfortable name.

We owe them the truth that starvation as a weapon of war is not a legal technicality — it is a mortal sin committed in slow motion in front of cameras that transmitted it to every phone on earth while the powerful negotiated.

We owe them our prayer. Not the prayer that makes us feel better. The prayer that costs something. The prayer of Gethsemane. The prayer of the man who sweated blood because He knew what was coming for the innocent.

Lord Jesus Christ, who stood in the Jordan Valley and read from Isaiah — the poor have the Gospel preached to them — look at what we have done with the land where You walked.

Look at what the kings of the earth have made of it.

And look at us. Look at those of us who called ourselves Your followers and did not speak. Did not demand. Did not refuse the comfortable lie that this was too complicated for a man of faith to have an opinion about.

"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." — Matthew 11:15, Douay-Rheims

There is a sound rising from Gaza. It has been rising for two years. It sounds like children crying in a language that needs no translation.

And the Lord of Hosts is hearing it even if the nations are not.

His justice is a torrent. It is coming. It does not ask for permission from the United Nations Security Council. It does not require a majority vote.

It simply comes.

As it always has. As it always will.

For the blood of the innocent has never gone unanswered in the economy of God —

not since Cain, not now, not ever.

"The Lord is just and hath loved justice: his countenance hath beheld righteousness." — Psalm 10:8, Douay-Rheims

Amen. And again I say, amen.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

© 2026 Texas Outlaw Press

https://texasoutlawpress.org