Of all the events related in the New Testament, the Ascension is one of the hardest to imagine—and, at least as commonly imagined, it may be the hardest to believe. It is, in a sense, Jesus’ last miracle. It is also the miracle that seems most like myth: a man rising like a rocket and disappearing into the clouds. Paintings about the Ascension can be very beautiful and very moving, but they almost never seem like representations of an event in history. They seem, instead, like the deus ex machina resolution of a story that had to end in a shroud of mystery—either a literal cloud (as in Acts) or a narrative fog (as in the Gospel of Luke).

All of which is to say, it is the kind of incident about which it would be very easy to write a bad poem and very hard to write a good one. Denise Levertov managed to write a good one. Last year I posted her poem for Holy Saturday, “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell.” That poem, too, dares to take up an event most of us find very hard to imagine, and it introduces themes that Levertov also explores in “Ascension”: the frictions between spirit and matter, the connection between Gospel triumph and surrender.

After the jump, the poem.

ASCENSION



Stretching Himself as if again,

through downpress of dust

upward, soul 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 reliquish

itself, its

human cells,

molecules, five

senses, linear

vision endured

as Man -

the sole

all-encompassing gaze

resumed now,

Eye of Eternity.

Reliquished, 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.