Lamentations 4:8 Meaning Their Appearance Is Blacker Than a Coal

Anicca: Impermanence Conditions give way; that is simply their nature. Faces praised as purer than snow and ruddier than coral now carry the color of a coal raked out of cold ashes, and one siege is all that stands between the two portraits. The blackness came from nowhere outside them; the brightness had been traveling toward it since the day it was admired, and famine only sped the journey.

Āhāra: Nutriment A body stands on food, one meal at a time. Skin pulled tight against bone is plain arithmetic: the storehouses shut, and the body began spending itself, flesh first, then whatever was left. No pleasure remains in eating inside a closed city, only the work of getting one more day out of the body, which is the sober way to take a meal even when the tables are full.

Asubha: The body's unloveliness Skin is a wrapping, and hunger takes it off. The shoulder standing out as bare bone belongs to the same person who walked this street in scarlet, carried the same frame under the fine cloth, and needed only a few empty weeks to show it. Nobody had to walk out to the burial ground to study this; the siege held it up in every doorway, on every face.

Māna: Conceit Standing among others rests on being recognized. Princes pass their own neighbors in the street and nobody turns, because rank had been riding on a face: color, fullness, good cloth, all of it thin enough to be starved away in a season. A position that hunger can take off a face was always a look other people were giving, and looks stop.

Jarāmaraṇa: Aging and death Every body finishes dry and stiff. Old age needs decades to turn a green branch into a dry stick; a shut city does it before the year turns. The withered thing lying in the street is the destination of the whole procession, and those still ruddy at the gate are only walking toward it at an easier pace.