“Free at Sauta Cave,” Poem, Carmine Di Biase.

I had seen his slaves that morning, arms and legs

trapped deep inside their marble blocks. Muscles taut,

veins filled with rage and futile indignation,

as if the sculptor, after all that time, might yet

come back to finish everyone, make everyone

a David, polished, self-possessed and free,

a sling resting, at the ready, on one shoulder.

At dusk, on that crowded bridge that joins

the Arno’s banks, the famous goldsmith’s bust:

his angry and defiant stare aimed straight at me.

The pope had pardoned him for killing several men, for God

bestowed such talent only on His rarest favorites.

It was there, before that bust, I was assailed by my old fear.

The first one nearly touched my hair, then flew erratically away.

A second and a third appeared, and soon, darting from all

angles, dozens of them came at me, though none so brazen

as the first had been. The slapping of its veined black wings still

sounded in my ears as I ran madly off that bridge, like a gypsy

who had picked some tourist’s pocket and then fled

the scene. I hoped the goldsmith’s ghost would spare me

and not laugh out loud for all to hear.

Now this hot summer, in this Alabama town where nine

young men once met with grave injustice, it is dusk

again. From the mouth of Sauta Cave a scout comes out

alone to see that all is well, then flies back in to fetch

the rest. The cave’s chill air washes over me as two more

emerge, then three; and seconds later all three hundred

thousand hover overhead, the reek of guano in the air.

They will fly off to the lake together now to take

their airborne meal, then come back here, one ton

of lustrous insects in their sated bellies, to hang once more,

serenely, from the cool stone walls of Sauta Cave. Their scene

unfolds this evening as it did when no one knew

that gold and marble could be shaped, and no one yet

had given names to admiration and to fear.

Carmine Di Biase’s chapbook of poems, American Rondeau, appeared in 2022 (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken, La Piccioletta Barca, Italian Americana, The Vincent Brothers Review, Scapegoat Review, Ovunque Siamo, and other journals. His reviews and translations appear occasionally in the Times Literary Supplement. A recent issue of L’Anello che non tiene: The Journal of Modern Italian Literature published his translations of thirteen poems by Cesare Pavese. Di Biase writes on Shakespeare and modern English and Italian literature. He has edited and translated, from the manuscript, The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo, which appeared in 2013. In 2015 Di Biase edited and introduced “Oh! Mio Vecchio William!”: Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare, a collection of essays by himself and other scholars who explore Shakespeare’s influence on Italy’s most important modern novelist. This spring will see the publication of Di Biase’s English translation of Carlo Collodi’s Peepee, or the Tiny Pink Monkey (North Meridian Books). This will be a bilingual edition of Collodi’s little-known sequel to Pinocchio. He is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Jacksonville State University.