A Call for Laments
City Lore and The Outer Edge are collaborating with a vision to evoke an outpouring of Laments in these historic and volatile times.
A few weeks ago, the Reverend Canon Sarah Snyder, who has served as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Canon for Reconciliation and works in places of conflict around the world including Israel and Gaza, asked her fellow clergy on a Zoom call to express their grief about the Middle East in the sacred tradition of lament, as spoken through the Psalms. The Psalms express collective and individual grief about injustice in the world. As the poet Ed Hirsch writes in Poet’s Glossary, “the poetry of lamentation seems to exist in all languages and poetries.” It appears in ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, Sanskrit, Zulu, and in the Hindu Vedas, among others. The Rev. Kathleen Mandeville, an Episcopal priest, who was on the Zoom, put out a call for people to write their own Laments via her Outer Edge coaching newsletter. One of the ways Kathleen defined lament was as a “visceral, heartbreaking cry.” We were touched by this initiative, and want to extend this call to our members and friends.
In times of crisis, City Lore has offered New Yorkers avenues to express their grief in words. After September 11th, City Lore documented the missing posters, posted poems, and street memorials, and curating the exhibit Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning. When Covid struck, we initiated a community poem, collected hundreds of creative responses to the pandemic, and partnered with Naming the Lost Memorials on an ongoing project to remember and honor the deaths and other losses from Covid. Addressing the crisis of an increasing red and blue divide in our nation, we created the project All the Voices: Across the Great Divide, a multi-pronged initiative to build cultural understanding across this nation’s political divide through heart-felt simple “Where I’m From” poems in a political context and from across the political spectrum.
We believe that if you start with your own personhood, writing – whether in heart-felt statements or poetry – can be a bridge to peace, understanding, and expressing our shared humanity. We invite you to participate with your own lament to address these sorrowful times. Please send yours to:
If at a later point we decide to post or publish any of this material, we will get back to you to request permission. All laments should be limited to one page. Please send before December 20th.
Here is Katherine Mandeville’s lament:
O my God,
I am in a land of beauty with color and light,
Yet my human kin in Palestine and Israel
are in a land of rubble and blood.
How shall we speak of this horror,
our horror, your horror, O God?
My voice is throttled
with hands of hopelessness at my throat.
I pour my tears into flowing waters:
May they reach the shores of Israel and Gaza.
“To end a grief we must save a life.”
Kathleen Mandeville is the spiritual leader of Gateway House, a growing sacred arts multi faith community in the Hudson Valley, founder & producer of IgniVox Productions, a production company, dedicated to the spiritual, regional and environmental witness through the arts. She launched The Outer Edge, a coaching & consultancy practice to support individuals & community organizations to realize the depth & truth of who they are, and to activate the manifestation of that truth in the broader world.
Here is another example, a lovely lament sent in by the writer Elizabeth Cunningham.
lament: an attempt
you whose name is known and unknown
where are you, why have you left us here
at the mercy and mercilessness of one another
you whose name we claim to know
we have forgotten: we are one, we are the other
you are with us across all closed borders
you are the one we call ally, enemy
you are the one dying in our arms
you are the one holding our brokenness
you whose name we cry out in every tongue
break us open not apart, quiet our clamor,
do not leave our hearts forsaken, heart of our hearts.
