LAMENTATION

But I have fallen into deep passions,
Into a pit of stagnant, foul mud,
Wherein the impossible abysses
Have seized me unto themselves.
Like the people of the former age,
Those who lived in the days of Noah the patriarch of the Ark.
They ate and they drank,
They mingled like beasts,
Until the waters of the flood arrived
And corrupted them all.
He alone was kept who maintained
For five hundred years his purity.
But You who saved Noah and the seven souls
In the ark,
Together with the species of four-footed animals
And the winged creatures of the air,
Save me also from the flood,
From the world-drowning waves of evil,
With the ark of Your holy tabernacle,
Secretly sheltered under Your shadow.
Cast out from the ark of my soul
The dark-colored crow,
Which is a type of the secret arrow,
That which flies through the darkness.
And open in my heart, amidst the twilight,
A window toward the great light.