Michelangelo

Naked and unashamed in broadest day,

Unmoved, unmoving, you can never share

Our thrilled bemusement at your standing there.

You grant our wish, and equally betray –

Muscles unmoving, lips that cannot say,

Brittle eternity of marble hair,

Proportionate perfection! Yet you are

Of stone, not flesh, in flight from our decay.

You look down with a mute I told you so,

Rebuke the perfect place where we would go

With all the flesh’s longing to be fair:

For in his marble, Michelangelo,

If he had missed the giant prisoned there,

Had formed no shape to shelter his despair.