Where the psalms of individual lament speak in the voice of a single sufferer, "I" cried, "my" soul is troubled, the fifth chapter of Lamentations speaks throughout in the first person plural: our inheritance, our necks, our fathers, our skin. This is not incidental phrasing. The chapter catalogues a city's collective ruin in specific, material terms, orphans without fathers, mothers become widows, water bought with silver, wood bought with a price, slaves ruling over free citizens, young men set to grinding at the mill, elders no longer honoured at the gate. Nothing here is metaphorical suffering; it is the itemised aftermath of a siege and a deportation, recited by survivors describing what has actually happened to their households and their city.
That specificity is what makes the turn to petition at the chapter's end land as it does. After eighteen verses of catalogue, the prayer abruptly changes register: "Thou, O Jehovah, sittest as king for ever," an assertion of God's continuing rule spoken directly into the middle of visible evidence against it, followed immediately by "Turn thou us unto thee, O Jehovah, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old." The community does not ask God to explain the disaster or to justify it. It asks only to be turned back, which is the same request the individual lament psalms make in miniature, scaled up to the size of an entire people speaking as if it were one voice with one broken heart.