1(The prayer of Jeremy) Call to remembrance, (O LORD) what we have suffered, consider and see our confusion.
2Our inheritance is turned to the strangers, and our houses to the aliens.
3We are become careful and fatherless, and our mothers are as the widows.
4We are fain to drink our own water for money, and our own wood must we buy with money.
5Our necks are under persecution, we are weary, and have no rest.
6Afore time we yielded our selves to the Egyptians, and now to the Assyrians, only that we might have bread enough.
7Our fathers (which now are gone) have sinned, and we must bear their wickedness.
8Servants have the rule of us, and no man delivereth us out of their hands.
9We must get our living with the peril of our lives because of the drouth of the wilderness.
10Our skin is as it had been brent in an oven, for very sore hunger.
11The wives are ravished in Sion, and the maidens in the cities of Judah.
12The princes are hanged up with the hand of the enemies, they have not spared the old sage men,
13they have taken young men's lives from them, and the boys are hanged up upon trees.
14The elders sit no more under the gates, and the young men use no more the playing of Music.
15The joy of our heart is gone, our merry query is turned into mourning.
16The garland of our head is fallen: alas, that ever we sinned so sore.
17Therefore our heart is full of heaviness, and our eyes dim:
18because of the hill of Sion that is destroyed. In so much, that the foxes run upon it.
19But thou, O LORD, that remainest for evermore, and thy seat world without end:
20Wherefore wilt thou still forget us, and forsake us so long?
21O LORD, turn thou us unto thee, and so shall we be turned. Renew our days as in old time,
22for thou hast now banished us long enough, and hast been sore displeased at us. [The end of the Lamentations of Ieremye.]