1: GOD, listen! Listen to my prayer, listen to the pain in my cries.
2: Don't turn your back on me just when I need you so desperately. Pay attention! This is a cry for help! And hurry--this can't wait!
3: I'm wasting away to nothing, I'm burning up with fever.
4: I'm a ghost of my former self, half-consumed already by terminal illness.
5: My jaws ache from gritting my teeth; I'm nothing but skin and bones.
6: I'm like a buzzard in the desert, a crow perched on the rubble.
7: Insomniac, I twitter away, mournful as a sparrow in the gutter.
8: All day long my enemies taunt me, while others just curse.
9: They bring in meals--casseroles of ashes! I draw drink from a barrel of my tears.
10: And all because of your furious anger; you swept me up and threw me out.
11: There's nothing left of me--a withered weed, swept clean from the path.
12: Yet you, GOD, are sovereign still, always and ever sovereign.
13: You'll get up from your throne and help Zion--it's time for compassionate help.
14: Oh, how your servants love this city's rubble and weep with compassion over its dust!
15: The godless nations will sit up and take notice -see your glory, worship your name--
16: When GOD rebuilds Zion, when he shows up in all his glory,
17: When he attends to the prayer of the wretched. He won't dismiss their prayer.
18: Write this down for the next generation so people not yet born will praise GOD:
19: "GOD looked out from his high holy place; from heaven he surveyed the earth.
20: He listened to the groans of the doomed, he opened the doors of their death cells."
21: Write it so the story can be told in Zion, so GOD's praise will be sung in Jerusalem's streets
22: And wherever people gather together along with their rulers to worship him.
23: GOD sovereignly brought me to my knees, he cut me down in my prime.
24: "Oh, don't," I prayed, "please don't let me die. You have more years than you know what to do with!
25: You laid earth's foundations a long time ago, and handcrafted the very heavens;
26: You'll still be around when they're long gone, threadbare and discarded like an old suit of clothes. You'll throw them away like a worn-out coat,
27: but year after year you're as good as new.
28: Your servants' children will have a good place to live and their children will be at home with you."