Dormition Poem by Scott Hairns

Dormition Most blessed among all women and among the mass of humankind, in this fraught image our mother is asleep. She lies arms crossed and, notably, across the spacious foreground upon an altared bed, her head upraised upon a scarlet robe, and we surround her strange repose perplexed by grief that couples homage nonetheless. Not we, exactly, but our holy antecedents, whose bright nimbi gleam undimmed despite their weeping. Here again the icon serves to limn the artifice of time, drawing to this one still point a broad synaxis of the blessed, including some whose souls unbodied have preceded her to Paradise. Most are bent in sorrow; several raise a hand to meet fresh tears. They mourn the dire severing of blesséd soul from blesséd body. Leaning in, Saint Peter lifts the censer with a prayer. Saint Andrew nearly falls upon the bier. Saint James Alpheus looks away, or looks for solace to Saint Luke, whose eyes—like those of Saints Heirtheus and adjacent brother James— direct us to the cupola behind our grief, from which the risen Christ attends the mother’s solemn funeral even as he bears her gleaming spirit in his arms, where she, so meek the weeping pilgrim might have missed her, rests swaddled in her shroud, waiting to be borne to Him, and bodily.