crepuscolo

via Emily and Jim

'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.)