What Matters to the Magi

The professor asked our seminar:

of all religions, which is most attached

to matter? The question garnered questions,

muted guesses, loud silence, then thought,

the ‘matter’ seeming too material,

unBuddhistic, temporal, trite and raw—

it couldn’t be pure Christianity,

the kind upheld by Francis of Assisi?

Sell all you have, give to the poor,

your cloak and tunic, too… yet said by

the Word-become-flesh, the need for God

to dwell among us, eat and sleep as cycles

framed within the matter of birth and death.

The magi came on “camels galled,”

as Eliot imagined, nothing regal if not

ignoble, all as creatures through the desert,

notwithstanding anything. The starlit sky

materialized for them a route,

provided clouds would not obscure

and lend to their disorientation;

epiphanies require such pointers,

it seems, and whether kings or sheep

herders or witnesses of witnesses of wit—

the world would never be the same.

One could say it never had to be;

then again, why throw away Epiphany?