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'How deserted lies the city, once thronging with people! Once great among the nations, now become a widow.' The words of a Ukrainian poet? Well, they could be, particularly if she came from Mariupol, whose citizens experience ever increasing brutality, as buildings which shelter hungry, damaged and terrorised people are indiscriminately bombed. 'How deserted lies the city, once thronging with people!' Well, it wasn't a Ukrainian poet; the words come from the Book of Lamentations written over two and half thousands years ago to bemoan the ransacking of Jerusalem and the deportation of its inhabitants to the territory of their oppressors. But the words resonate perfectly today. I believe that there are two ways in which we can empathise with people in deep distress. One is via the print or visual media. We read reports, we see images of massive destruction and human suffering. Sometimes the facts stick in our minds; we share what we have seen and read with friends. We all agree it's terrible. But there is another way to empathise. It is to read the poetry of lament which does not so much record facts as register feelings. Whether it be the black population under Apartheid in South Africa, or the African Americans under slavery, or the citizens of nations occupied by Russia during the cold war; in such places people found or wrote laments to annotate their shared distress - poems that ask Why? How long?; that call out to heaven and humanity for an end to torment. Such a poem I learned from a young man exiled from El Salvador during the bloody civil war. I asked him what was the song he carried in his heart and in Spanish he sang these words which I read in English: O great God and Lord of the earth, rouse yourself, and demonstrate justice; give the arrogant what they deserve, silence all malevolent boasting. See how some you love are broken for they know the weight of oppression; even widows and orphans are murdered and poor strangers are innocent victims. Years later I discovered, that these words came from Psalm 94. Many people avoid reading these kinds of verses, believing that such vocabulary is sub-Christian, but quite unaware that Jesus endorsed and encouraged the ability to lament.