Ashes and altars
Verse 1
They never touched the sunrise
Never sang or felt the breeze
No birthdays marked in expectation
No prayers beneath the trees
No first steps in the kitchen
No tears from skinned-up knees
We took what God was shaping
And refused to let them breathe
Verse 2
Sixty million children died
Since Roe gave death a name
That’s fifty times the fallen
From every war we’ve claimed
And those are just the counted—
What of the secret ones?
The pills that drain in silence
Oh the daughters and the sons
Chorus
Ashes and altars—Lord, forgive this land
We offered up our children with our own blood on our hands
More lost than all our battles, more gone than every war
Ashes and altars—we don’t know what we buried them for
Verse 3
We wrapped their fate in rhetoric
In selfish fear and choice
We crowned ourself with comfort
And silenced every voice
We strapped them in a straitjacket
Of profit, pride, and lust
And claimed it was compassion—
every mother's choice
Bridge
Their blood cries out from clinics
From dumpsters and from drains
From mothers’ haunted silence
And fathers wracked with chains
We feasted at the altar
Of self and sterile reign
And mocked the holy heavens
With a nameless generations genocide
Final Chorus
Ashes and altars—we tremble at the flame
We lit it in our cities and baptized it with blame
But You, O Lord, are merciful, and justice still remains
Ashes and altars—wash this blood-stained land with rain
Outro
Let mercy fall like thunder…
Let memory breathe again…
We cannot raise the buried—
But we can kneel, and repent for the end…
Ashes… and altars…
Ashes… and altars…