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The Three Kings · Jan 6, 04:10 AM

January 6, 2006, I am reminded by (lapsed or not lapsed?) Christian (some Catholic) friends that today is Three Kings, and it’s noted that I am supposed to know already, because I ‘wrote a song about it’. Hmm, not quite. I don’t know much of Three Kings day, except that it’s the feast of the Epiphany, when, we were informed as children, it was time to take the Christmas decorations down, to avoid bad luck. And also that in the southern part of the Americas it’s a big deal, the time when children receive presents during the night, the proof of the messengers being the straw strewn on the living room floor that morning, and the crumbs of almost finished camel food on the table.

On the north shore of Puerto Rico, on the rising ground that eventually becomes El Morro, the fortress heights, there’s a slope on which stand three statues; men, on camels. It’s a surprisingly bleak area for a tropical land, where the wind courses steadily off the seemingly endless Atlantic Ocean, and waves slowly and regularly crash at the base of the cliffs. The statues are large, and that fact, along with the force of the inevitable elements, makes this one of those places where you feel just a bit smaller, more humble, and mortal. You don’t matter quite so much when you are here.

Up and down this shore, at various points for miles are cemeteries, to the west higher on the cliffs, and eastwards, a mile or two away, they are adjacent to the sand, lodged between housing estates. Cemeteries where, if you stand quiet, it seems as if the dead crowd forward to seek succour from the living.

Eastward too, the Luis Munoz Marin airport, scene of the onset of so many adventures, migrations begun, lingering partings, and returns, often to relatives aged by the decades between. This airport is the epicentre of an entire diaspora, fueled by one of the few traditionally colonial relationships extant in this world.

It’s the flux of these memories and the feelings evoked, coupled with a moment of quick clean fury, that I used to birth the lyric for my song ‘The Three Kings’. The music was a combination of my desire to use a classic rock ‘Emajor Gmajor Amajor’ progression, and a chorus of almost hymnal movement (a sixth chord with the tonic in the bass descending through the dominant with the seventh in the bass through to the sub-dominant to G major and on down) that I’d had kicking around for months.

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