Adoration of the Magi, by Garth Ferrante

Adoration of the Magi, by Antonio Vivarini (Italy). 1445-1447.

Adoration of the Magi

so much fanfare and heraldry for such a dying place to be born: isn't this what the artist is trying to tell us, that the kings of earth have the same colours as the angels of heaven, that only god has more splendour and more power than any of them, and we still don't know what sort of divinity this imparts to the little lord who sits as a full-grown babe as opposed to a newborn, but artists can be forgiven such things, and after all, he wouldn't want to make the christ-child impossible to see just for perspective's sake...heck, they wouldn't even do three-point perspective right for quite a time yet, but that isn't the worst of it, no...it's that no one should bend to his creator just because they are a creator...what did this god do that was so wonderful before this but make a string of mistakes he wanted nothing more than to disown with his inconsistent and selfish rules, with allowing so much pain in the name of free will, and yet where was that free will for mary when it was time to choose whether she wanted to be a mother, to carry such a burden with her all her life, if it was even revealed to her what that burden was and where it would lead her...maybe we're all looking at the best of that old man in the child who would buck the system just by being the revolutionary who told people to love as they wanted to be loved, to treat others as they wanted to be treated...this was enough to get their weaponized hatred aimed right at him, and what have we lost?: only exactly what we've gained, that every year we hear the libretto going on and on about glory and being born, but we don't hear of his messages that would make the man's words truly the stuff of legend, the stuff that makes all who hear his words love him...we get the allusion to a saviour and a king of kings, and we are supposed to set aside the tragedy of his death because it is his birthday, not his deathday, and yet the ouroboros of his life cannot be segmented to just his birth, for what was he, really, at this stage?...he was a seed, he was a baby aureoled, haloed, blessed with the artist's rendering of what is supposed to be the holy trinity with mary as the proxy for all women, without whom this miracle could not have happened...and the lowliness of his birth is given the complete revisionist history of what people at that time might've thought it was like to be visited in the middle of the night by three magi and their entourage, which is much like what we have done with our songs and our merriment that always hunt us and find us and kill us with one arrow of melody and madrigal after another: it is better for most to think of the beginning of this story when he was not dead, when he was just born, which is the furthest thing from death...everything that comes after really is the rock just rolling down again...

Garth Ferrante

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic Christmas challenge.

​Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.