Unfinished Statue
(Michelangelo's David-Apollo)

Suprised, ah suprised
Naked, beyond time,
While paused
In remote wilderness.

Still rooted to the earth,
To tree-trunk
And rock, on the frontier
Between childhood and youth.

It is the instant--the pure
Dawn of the body,
The astonished secret--
of the virgin.

Repose and movement
Coincide, now in arms,
In sex - unopened flower--
Or thighs, the bows of a lyre.

At the lintel of his own existence
He hesitates, wholly self-involved.
He stares at himself
And fails to recognise.

Head fallen,
Eyes half-closed,
Lost in thought he listens
Inwardly to his own fate.

Hush. Let him not wake
When he falls into time.
Already his eternities
are lost this very day.

But you must contemplate
At length that beauty
That knows no passion;
Contemplate: voice and lament.

Love, the only human power,
Has brought it here:
From nothingness to this slumber
Where, latent still, yet it emerges.

Luis Cernuda.