For when it is worse than sad, and you do not want a prayer that hurries you out of it. Three psalms that say how bad it is, out loud, first — and one of them never gets past that.
They start where you are. Most prayers begin by naming God and end by asking; a lament begins by saying, in detail, what is wrong, and does not apologize for the detail. I am counted among them that go down to the pit. That is allowed. It is in the book.
Two of these three turn before the end. Psalm 12 gets to I have trusted in thy mercy in six verses. Psalm 21 gets there too, further on, though the lines given here are the ones before it does. Psalm 87 never turns. Its last word is misery, and there is nothing after it. The people who assembled the Psalter left it that way on purpose, which means there is a night the Church expects you to have, and has a prayer for.
What they ask for is plain: make it stop, and look at me. Nothing grander. On this site those are the two requests that appear least in the prayers that were kept — which is exactly why these three are here, so the collection tells the truth about itself.
The Psalms are Hebrew poems, most of them older than the Temple that sang them, ascribed to David by a tradition nobody can prove and nobody has needed to. They are the one place in the collection where what a person actually said in trouble, what was kept, and what was put into scripture are the same words. Human-made, time-tested, and in the canon.
Psalm 21 is the psalm of Good Friday, because the one whose words these were said them again on the cross — Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani — and the Gospels record it. Psalm 12 has been the prayer of people waiting for an answer for three thousand years. Psalm 87 was never softened, never cut, and never given a hopeful last line. It is still in the rotation of the Church's night prayer, exactly as it is here.
If you are reading this at three in the morning, there is a page for that hour, and it opens dark.