The Epstein Files: A Psalm of Fire and Reckoning by Jeff Callaway

The Epstein Files: A Psalm of Fire and Reckoning

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

(Cried Out Before the Throne of the Living God, From the Ruins of a Nation That Sold Its Children)

O Lord God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God who opened the earth and swallowed Korah whole, God who turned the cities of the plain to cinders, God who does not sleep and cannot be bribed, I come before Thee not with polished words and not with the careful language of men who fear the opinion of other men more than they fear Thee.

I come with the raw throat of a people betrayed. I come with the grief of mothers who do not yet know what happened to their children. I come with the rage of the righteous who have watched the wicked walk free for decades, shielded by money, shielded by title, shielded by the very institutions that were built to protect the innocent and chose instead to protect the guilty.

Hear me, Lord. And do not be gentle with them.

Let the record be read aloud before Thy throne.

These were not merely powerful men who stumbled. These were not sinners who fell in a moment of weakness and wept in the confessional. These were architects. These were engineers of evil who built an entire infrastructure for the hunting and the breaking of children.

They flew them in on private aircraft. They kept them on a private island beyond the reach of any law that had not already been purchased. They passed them to one another like objects. Like property. Like there was no soul inside the body, no voice behind the eyes, no God watching from above who would one day demand a full accounting.

The children were young, Lord. Some were barely past childhood. Some were still in it. And the men who used them were senators and billionaires, celebrities and power brokers, men who appeared on television and spoke of justice and of rights while their names were logged in a leather book beside the proof of what they truly were.

They told the children to be quiet. They paid the children's families into silence. They threatened. They buried. They erased. And when one man was finally caught, they handed him a sweetheart deal that would shame the courts of Sodom and let him walk while the children he destroyed were still trying to learn how to live in the bodies that had been taken from them.

This is what is in the files, Lord. Thou already knowest. Now let the whole world know. And let the reckoning come that the courts of men have refused to deliver.

Let Thy judgment fall, O God, with the full weight of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Not a fine. Not a monitored release. Not a sealed plea agreement negotiated by compromised prosecutors in a system so rotten the smell has reached Heaven.

Sodom and Gomorrah judgment. Fire from above. The kind that does not leave a single pillar of the corrupt structure standing. The kind that becomes a lesson carved into the memory of every civilization that comes after.

Let every man whose name is in those files and who has not repented in sackcloth before Thee find that there is no island far enough, no bunker deep enough, no lawyer expensive enough, no politician loyal enough to stand between them and Thy hand.

Let their wealth become worthless to them. Let their security become terror. Let the sleep they stole from those children be stolen from them permanently. Let them understand at last, in whatever time remains to them, what it is to be utterly without protection before a God who saw everything and forgot nothing.

And what of those who knew and said nothing?

What of the politicians who received the donations and asked no questions? What of the prosecutors who offered the deal and buried the victims twice? What of the journalists who had the story and killed it to protect their access? What of the institutions, the universities, the foundations, the agencies, that took the money and laundered the reputation of a man who was using children as currency among the ruling class?

They are guilty, Lord. Not equally guilty. But guilty. Complicity is its own damnation.

The man who holds the torch while another burns the village does not walk away clean. The man who looks at the smoke on the horizon and turns his face away and says nothing, does nothing, because the man with the torch also signs the checks, that man will also answer.

Let them answer, Lord. Every last one. From the highest office to the lowest functionary who shredded the document and told himself he had no choice.

There is always a choice. The martyrs proved it. The saints proved it. The children who told their stories into a void that refused to echo them back proved it.

There is always a choice. And every man who chose silence chose the abuser over the abused and will stand before Thee with that choice written on him in a script no excuse can erase.

And while the children bled, Lord, they waged the wars.

They sent the young men of this nation to die on the other side of the world for interests that were never American, for borders that were never ours to bleed for, for foreign agendas dressed in the borrowed clothes of words like freedom and democracy and security while the men who wrote the speeches sent none of their own.

Not one son. Not one daughter. The donor class does not bleed. The donor class sends others to bleed and then invests in the reconstruction contracts before the smoke has cleared the battlefield.

They have made of this nation's military a mercenary force for the enrichment of those who have never heard a shot fired in anger, who have never carried a friend's body, who have never written a letter to a mother in Ohio explaining how her boy died for something she cannot even find on a map.

And the poor keep enlisting because there are no jobs, because the economy was gutted to feed the same class of men who names appear in the files, who own the think tanks that justify the wars, who sit on the boards of the weapons manufacturers, who pray at no altar but profit.

Condemn them, Lord. With the full voice of the prophets. With the full weight of Thy law. With the fire Thou hast used before and wilt not hesitate to use again.

Hear also the cry of the poor, O God.

In this nation of unimaginable wealth there are children going to bed hungry tonight. There are veterans dying on waiting lists. There are families choosing between medicine and food, between heat and rent, between dignity and survival.

Not because there is not enough. Because the enough has been hoarded by the same class of men who appear in those files, who fund those wars, who purchase those legislators, who have made of this republic a private estate managed for their comfort and policed for their protection.

The rich man feasted and fared sumptuously every day. Lazarus lay at his gate. Thou remembered Lazarus. Thou always remember Lazarus.

Remember the Lazaruses of this nation, Lord. And remember what became of the rich man.

But God of mercy, God of the second chance, God who redeemed even the murderer David and made of him a vessel of Thy praise, hear also this:

Send us new men.

Send us leaders who have known the bottom. Send us leaders who have been Lazarus, who have gone to bed hungry, who have sat in the emergency room without insurance, who have watched a factory close and a community die and understood in their bones what the policy decisions of distant powerful men do to real human lives.

Send us leaders who cannot be bought because they have already learned that everything that can be purchased is worth nothing.

Send us leaders who read the Beatitudes not as poetry but as a governing philosophy. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Let righteousness govern this nation again. Let the fear of God walk back into the halls of power where it has not been seen in longer than any of us can remember.

Let Christ be the cornerstone of this republic's restoration. Not the comfortable Christ of the prosperity gospel. Not the campaign rally Christ of the photo opportunity. The Christ of the whip in the temple. The Christ of woe unto you scribes and Pharisees. The Christ who said what you do to the least of these you do to Me.

Those children in the files, those are the least of these. And what was done to them was done to Christ.

Let that settle on every soul in this nation like a stone.

Restore us, Lord. Break us first if Thou must. We have earned the breaking. But restore us.

Raise up from the rubble a nation that remembers its covenant with Thee. A nation that protects its children above the reputations of powerful men. A nation that wages peace with the same ferocity it has waged war. A nation where Lazarus finally gets up from the gate and is brought inside.

We are on our knees, Lord. The proud have had their season. Let it end.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Amen.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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