When I Look at the Pictures - Lawrence Ferlinghetti (6)

In Intertime Praxiteles

In hintertime Praxiteles
laid about him with a golden maul
striking into stone
his alabaster ideals
uttering all
the sculptor’s lexicon
in visible syllables
He cast bronze trees
petrified a chameleon on one
made stone doves
fly
His calipers measured bridges
and lovers
and certain other superhumans whom
he caught upon their dusty way
to death

They never reached it then

You still can almost see
their breath
Their stone eyes staring
thru three thousand years
allay our fears of aging

although Praxiteles himself
at twenty-eight lay dead

for sculpture isn’t for
young men
as Constantin Brancusi
at a later hour
said

Poema de Lawrence Ferlinghetti para "Apolo Sauróctonos" de Praxiteles, 350-330 AC. Museu do Vaticano