The Book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible provides the formal template for an entire tradition of communal lamentation poetry, and African American poets have drawn on this tradition to address losses that exceed individual grief and demand communal acknowledgement; A poet writing a formal lamentation might adopt the structural features of biblical lament: direct address to God or the community, detailed description of the suffering endured, urgent petition for response or relief, and the assertion that the grief is proportionate to a genuine and devastating loss; Gwendolyn Brooks's elegies function as formal lamentations when they address not only individual deaths but the systemic conditions that produce those deaths, demanding that the reader share in the grief rather than merely observe it from a comfortable distance; A student poet might write a lamentation in response to a specific community tragedy, a school shooting, a police killing, a natural disaster, using the formal structures of biblical and African oral lamentation to give collective voice to the community's grief; Sonia Sanchez's "Does Your House Have Lions?" uses a stanza form drawn partly from the lamentation tradition to give sustained formal shape to grief for a brother lost to AIDS, treating his death as both personal loss and community crisis; A contemporary poet might write a lamentation about climate change's disproportionate impact on Black communities, connecting the ancient formal tradition of communal grieving to the specific contemporary experience of communities whose homes and ways of life are being destroyed by a crisis they did not create