"Lent" by Miriam LeFevre Crouse

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.


LENT
by Miriam LeFevre Crouse

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem again --
The long, hazardous climb, and then
The menacing city upon the hill;
It is time to go with Christ and his twelve men.

Let us all go up to Jerusalem, bend
The will to the tortuous way till the end --
Those of the curious gaze, the blind,
The sick, the lame by the road, betrayer and friend.

Let us go. The palms and the singing trees await
In Jerusalem, the greed and the hate;
The upper room and Gethsemane,
The judgment hall and death without the gate.

We shall run to the garden the third dawn
And, stooping, find that our Lord is gone
From the tomb; at the Voice, we shall turn and know
That the living Christ bids us rejoice and be on.

Every trail of the stars, of the earth and the sea,
The roads of the past, and those to be,
Christ walks on his way to Jerusalem;
And it is time to go up in his company.


Source: Christ in Poetry (Association Press, 1952), an anthology compiled and edited by Thomas Curtis Clark and Hazel Davis Clark