“The Visitation” by Calvin B. LeCompte Jr. (poem)

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To Elizabeth she came,
over the hills,
bearing the Lord flowering in her womb—

sacrament of her flesh,
bud richly taut—

the warmth of her
containing His infinity,
the sun His fire.

The dark earth of her body
seemed to encompass all things.
The terraced fields of Juda
pregnant with seed
called out to her
as she passed,
praising the Child
she was yet to bear,
invoking His blessing
on their expectancy.

These must call out,
full in their fullness,
barren beside hers,
then how should a child
six months conceived
adore with stillness
in his mother’s womb?

“The Visitation” by Calvin B. LeCompte Jr., based on Luke 1:39–45, appears in I Sing of a Maiden: The Mary Book of Verse, ed. Sister M. Thérèse (New York: Macmillan, 1947).

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In this poem Calvin B. LeCompte Jr. compares the embryonic Christ to a flower bud about to bloom from the warm, dark seedbed of Mary. The glorious abundance of the spring hills, he writes, is nothing—“barren beside hers”—compared to the abundance and glory Mary holds within her, soon to be revealed. LeCompte personifies the Judean countryside that Mary passes through, in her first trimester, on her way to her cousin Elizabeth’s house, who is herself six months pregnant. Like these women, the fields are “pregnant with seed.” And they recognize with reverence the Christ who travels past them, borne in the womb of his mother. They (the grasses) wave, they bow; they call out to him, seeking blessing. If even nonhuman nature is moved by the as-yet-latent Jesus and can’t help but react with praise, then how much more ought the unborn John, kinsman and appointed forerunner, to leap and rejoice when, momentarily, his mom and Jesus’s embrace belly to belly and sing Magnificat.

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Calvin Byrd LeCompte Jr. (1922–2001) was a Black Catholic educator, musician, literary critic, and occasional poet from Washington, DC, the son of a prominent medical doctor. He earned a BA in English in 1943 and an MA in linguistics in 1948, both from the Catholic University of America, and he attended a number of the “literary salons” Ezra Pound held at St. Elizabeths Hospital in DC while Pound was a psychiatric patient there. LeCompte also studied piano under Cecil Cohen, giving lecture-recitals at colleges around the country in the late forties, and taught voice at the Frederick Wilkerson Studio for some twenty years. He then went on to serve for twenty-three years as music director at Epiphany Catholic Church in Georgetown, as well as music director at the classical radio station WGMS, where he created and hosted the program Music in Our Time as a showcase and teaching forum for contemporary classical music. A professor of English and music at the University of the District of Columbia, he also lectured at Howard University, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Kennedy Center, the Opera Guild, and the Folger Library. In addition, he translated in eight languages for the National Catholic News Service.