Ephraim: The Nisibene Hymns
Nisibene Hymn 10: My Children Have Been Slain
My children have been slain, and my daughters that are outside me:
their walls are overthrown, their children scattered,
and their holy places trodden down.
Refrain: Blessed is your chastening!
The fowlers have taken my doves out of my strongholds;
they left their nests and fled to the caves,
and in the net they have been taken.
Like wax that melts before the fire,
so the bodies of my sons melted and dissolved before the heat
and the drought of my strongholds.
And instead of the streams of milk that used to flow
for my sons and my little ones,
milk fails the nursing babies, and water the weaned children.
The nursing baby falls from its mother and gasps,
because it cannot suck, and she cannot nurse;
they breathe out their spirit and die.
How is it possible that your grace can hold back
the welling of its stream, when it is not possible to restrain
the abundance of its flow?
And why has your grace shut up its mercies
and withheld its streams from the people who cry out,
so that none may moisten their tongue?
And there was a pit between them and their brothers,
as with the rich man who cried out and there was no one to answer,
to moisten his tongue.
And as if into the midst of fire the wretched ones were cast;
heat in the midst of thirst, the fire was blowing
and kindling upon them.
Their corpses melted and dissolved in the heat;
those who had thirsted gave the earth to drink in their turn
of the reek of their bodies.
And the fort that had killed its own dwellers with thirst
drank in its turn the fluid that ran from the corpses
that were melted by thirst.
Who has ever seen a people burning with thirst,
while a wall of water surrounded them, and they could not
moisten their tongue!
Surely my beloved were judged with the judgment of Sodom,
and my children struck with the torment of Sodom;
though that lasted only a single day.
The torment of fire, O my Lord, may last only an hour;
but in lingering thirst it is a lingering death
and a subtle punishment.
After my sorrows, O my Lord, and my bitter sufferings,
this is the best comfort with which you have comforted me:
that you have multiplied my afflictions.
The medicine I hoped for is sorrow decreed;
the binding up I looked for is bitter calamity,
which it seeks to work on me.
And whereas I hoped to escape from the midst of the storm,
worse for me is the storm in the harbor itself
than the one at sea.
Whereas I thought in my folly that I would anchor and escape
from the midst of the gulf, my sins have cast me back
into the midst of it again.
Look, O my Lord, at my limbs, how thick the swords are in me,
and how they have left their mark on my arms; and the scars of the spears
are planted in my sides!
Tears in my eyes, and in my ears evil rumors,
wailing in my mouth and mourning in my heart!
Add no more to me, O my Lord!