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