- published: 20 Mar 2015
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A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant would lament about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing, moaning and/or crying.
Many of the oldest and most lasting poems in human history have been laments. Laments are present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and laments continued to be sung in elegiacs accompanied by the aulos in classical and Hellenistic Greece. Lament elements figure in Beowulf, in the Hindu Vedas, and in ancient Near Eastern religious texts, including the Mesopotamian city laments such as the Lament for Ur and the Jewish Tanakh, (which would later become the Christian Old Testament).
In many oral traditions, both early and modern, the lament has been a genre usually performed by women: Batya Weinbaum made a case for the spontaneous lament of women chanters in the creation of the oral tradition that resulted in the Iliad The material of lament, the "sound of trauma" is as much an element in the Book of Job as in the genre of pastoral elegy, such as Shelley's "Adonais" or Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis".
Into the shadows of life to which we've been driven
In the ruins of Eden to which we have come
Under bleeding skies still writhes this tortured land
And this world without end stands forsaken
And we forget, have we gone so wrong?
That onward we march, lost and enslaved to their culture's carrion song
The truth in the silences goes unheard, as we drown in their hideous faith
For they've built up their temples to slavery, and the stench of deceit
suffocates
Through this night which we crawl
For there is always further to fall
Their rust scarred cities stand
To mark the graves below
The poisoned skies they weep
For their fates are cast in stone
The oceans boiling black upon the shores
Of this bloodstained waste landscape
That burns forevermore
And they step blind through this fever mad dance
In the last days of Eden which have come at last
And they've traded cheap the world and her love
For keys to the kingdom of filth above
(their cold kisses taste of blood and despair)
But we may surrender humanity's shame
Reborn from the ashes of our world in flames
Burn, burn with the fires of change
Tear down their culture of conquest and greed
With unblended eyes a new dawn to greet
And cast off the weight of humanity's sin