Ascension

How can you leave your flock,
O holy shepherd,
in this valley deep and dark,
while you break the pure
air, departing to regions immortal and secure?

Those once blessed,
now sad, afflicted,
those nourished at your breast
and now by you dispossessed,
where will they turn their faces?

Can their eyes,
having seen the beauty of your face,
see anything now that does not fret them?
And to ears that heard your sweetness,
is not all else clamor and dullness?

And that swollen sea,
who now shall calm it?
Who tame the burning wind?
With you in eclipse,
what star shall guide the ship to port?

O envious cloud,
do you grudge even our brief delight?
Where do you fly in such haste?
Your departure, so splendid and bright!
But how poor and blind you leave us!

--Fray Luis de Leon (1527-1591) Spanish Augustinian monk, mystic, and poet of Spain’s “Golden Age,” imprisoned for four years during the Spanish Inquisition due to charges from two Dominican professors.

Ascension

Salute the last, and everlasting day,

Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,
Ye whose true tears, or tribulation
Have purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.
Behold, the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon;
Nor doth He by ascending show alone,
But first He, and He first enters the way.
O strong Ram, which hast batter’d Heaven for me!
Mild lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark’d the path!
Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!
O, with Thy own Blood quench Thy own just wrath;
And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise,
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

-- John Donne (1572-1631) English priest, poet, and essayist

Ascension Day

Why stand ye gazing up into Heaven? this same Jesus, which

is taken up from you into Heaven, shall so come in like
manner as ye have seen Him go into Heaven. Acts i. 11

Soft cloud, that while the breeze of May
Chants her glad matins in the leafy arch,
Draw'st thy bright veil across the heavenly way
Meet pavement for an angel's glorious march:

My soul is envious of mine eye,
That it should soar and glide with thee so fast,
The while my grovelling thoughts half buried lie,
Or lawless roam around this earthly waste.

Chains of my heart, avaunt I say-
I will arise, and in the strength of love
Pursue the bright track ere it fade away,
My Saviour's pathway to His home above.

Sure, when I reach the point where earth
Melts into nothing from th' uncumbered sight,
Heaven will o'ercome th' attraction of my birth.
And I shall sink in yonder sea of light:

Till resting by th' incarnate LORD,
Once bleeding, now triumphant for my sake,
I mark Him, how by seraph hosts adored,
He to earth's lowest cares is still awake.

The sun and every vassal star,
All space, beyond the soar of angel wings,
Wait on His word: and yet He stays His car
For every sigh a contrite suppliant brings.

He listens to the silent tear
For all the anthems of the boundless sky-
And shall our dreams of music bar our ear
To His soul-piercing voice for ever nigh?

Nay, gracious Saviour-but as now
Our thoughts have traced Thee to Thy glory-throne
So help us evermore with thee to bow
Where human sorrow breathes her lowly moan.

We must not stand to gaze too long,
Though on unfolding Heaven our gaze we bend
Where lost behind the bright angelic throng
We see CHRIST'S entering triumph slow ascend.

No fear but we shall soon behold,
Faster than now it fades, that gleam revive,
When issuing from his cloud of fiery gold
Our wasted frames feel the true sun, and live.

Then shall we see Thee as Thou art,
For ever fixed in no unfruitful gaze,
But such as lifts the new-created heart,
Age after age, in worthier love and praise.

--John Keble (1792-1866), Anglican priest, poet, professor, and one of the leaders of the Oxford movement

Ascension

It wasn’t just wind, chasing
thin gunmetal clouds
across the loud sky;
it wasn’t the feeling that one might ascend
on that excited air,
rising like a trumpet note.

And it wasn’t just my sister’s water breaking,
her crying out,
the downward draw of blood and bone….

It was all of that,
the mud and new grass
pushing up through melting snow,
the lilac in bud
by my front door, bent low
by last week’s ice storm.

Now the new mother, that leaky vessel,
begins to nurse her child,
beginning the long good-bye.


--Kathleen Norris (1947- ), Benedictine oblate , poet, and essayist

Ascension

Stretching Himself as if again,
          through downpress of dust
                    upward, soil giving way
to thread of white, that reaches
          for daylight, to open as green
                    leaf that it is...
Can Ascension
          not have been
                    arduous, almost
as the return
          from Sheol, and
                    back through the tomb
into breath?
          Matter reanimate
                    now must relinquish
itself, its
          human cells,
                    molecules, five
senses, linear
          vision endured
                    as Man--
the sole
          all-encompassing gaze
                    resumed now,
Eye of Eternity.
          Relinquished, earth's
                    broken Eden.
Expulsion,
          liberation,
                    last
self-enjoined task
          of Incarnation.
                    He again
Fathering Himself.
          Seed-case
                    splitting,
He again
          Mothering His birth:
                    torture and bliss.

-- Denise Levertov (1923-1997), English/American poet, from Evening Train, 1992, in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, 2013


Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Ascension of Christ, 1636