The Coming of the Magi

A Poem by David Lewis Paget

We barely remembered the former times

For our times had ceased to run,

Were wiped as clean as our memories

In the land of the hidden sun,

For a darkness came on the barley fields

And it changed the lie of the land,

For when we rose in the morning, there

Was nothing but sea and sand.

All our cities were washed away

And all of our knowledge too,

Whole populations had disappeared

And left us with just a few,

We’d lived high up on the mountainside

When the sea had reared to flood,

But when the water receded there

Was nothing but sand and mud.

A man had wandered into the town

In the month before the last,

He said, ‘You people better gird up

For the future, not the past,

For the stars line up in a curious way

That will see the earth undone,

And what is normal will slip away

To the place where dreams come from.’

He wore a turban, yellow and green

And a beard right down to his waist,

A line of stars on both of his arms

And a half-moon, neatly traced.

‘The earth is trying to shake you off

Like the virus you’ve become,

To grow anew from the bedlam that

Your lives and your works have won.’

He said he was called ‘The Magi’, and

Came once in a thousand years,

But most of the people jeered at him,

‘You’ll not fool us with your curse!’

A week went by and a storm blew up

And the people began to doubt,

Trying to hide their fear inside

As the moon and the stars went out.

Nothing was left down on the plain

Not a stone lay on a stone,

Nothing that you could recognise

On earth, from our former home,

The Magi sat and he watched us grieve

For the things that we had lost,

And said, ‘You never could quite believe

That you have to count the cost.’

We ploughed the fields with our oxen

And we ground our wheat on a stone,

The Magi seemed to approve of it

So he left us to stand alone,

But the people pined for their history

For the life that had gone before,

‘I’ll let you into the mystery,’

He said, ‘if you’re really sure!’

So now we meet in the village hall

That we built from scattered stone,

And he tells us tales in a darkened room

Of the wonders that have flown,

Each night, the characters flicker

Like a light playing on a screen,

Firing imaginations of

A world that is now a dream.

He reels off tales about magic, how

The stars had reflected light,

Before, when the clouds had parted

Not like now, as they block sunlight,

He says there once was a moon that crashed

Into a distant star,

And slowly we are remembering

The who and the what we are.

But one in seven of babies born

Is perishing in the cold,

We’re slowing the population now

Not like in the days of old,

The earth is blossoming green again

Though you’d think it rather odd,

That people mutter between themselves

Of a deity, called ‘God!’

David Lewis Paget

© 2013 David Lewis Paget

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Linda Marie Van Tassell

I often wonder how the ancients, supposedly without the technology, equipment, or tools, were able to build the pyramids at Giza or any of the other various monolithic structures around the globe. We can't replicate those structures today nor can we figure out how they were built. Neither can we explain how similar structures sprang up around the globe among people who supposedly knew nothing about the other. They had to have help from a higher source.

Some call that source God, but I wonder about aliens. If God, after all, comes from another place on high and he is not of this earth, would not he, too, be an alien?