'To the grey Sacristy of San Lorenzo
tourists come whispering lest they waken
this self-absorbed statue and it assail
each prying one of them, lest a stone hand
uplift to point and the stone head utter,
slowly turning, "Wrongdoing and shame prevail!"
Once all drowsy in Carrara. Harmlessly,
unnumbered shadows brooded under the weight
of rock-ledges, lizards hardly animate.
Then certain men came. Still the stone's cry
safe and soundless, still the statue slumbered
in the refuge of the rock's estate.
But, soon, massive slabs were brutally urged
from the mountain — the half-bright, half-stripped bodies
of workmen struggling in dazzle and bone-
white powder of marble, smoking sunlight.
How could they discern the one waking there
or hear stone words in the larynx of the stone?
And later, in Florence? Only the sculptor
heard the statue, almost delivered, crying
"Dear to me is sleep, dearer to be at peace,
in stone, while wrongdoing and shame prevail.
Not to see, not to know, would be a great blessing."
So the statue pleaded, so the sculptor ceased.
More than four hundred years since they set out
from Carrara, each mile cursed and supervised.
The body in the rock staying young but the hair
turning grey and the face ageing utterly —
its idioplasm fixed, its night-accepting look
despairingly defined in the eyes not there.
Now, this evening, on exercise, three warplanes
dive on Carrara, flee, return, rehearse
radioactive speeds so shamelessly
that, in the x-rayed mountain, another
fifty million statues cower, unhatched,
and not one, stone-enslaved, wanting to be free.'
- Dannie Abse
Crepuscolo
(Crepuscolo (Evening) is one of the partly finished statues by Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel, San Lorenzo.)
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