Dawn tiptoes through the shutters, grey then bright morning sun.
The city wakes up in the street.  I hear footsteps and voices
along the Arno.  The building rests still-silent within the
awakening town.  Security guards tramp down distant corridors,
turning off alarms, switching on a glare of lights.

So the ordeal of each day begins, another term of coy
nakedness, Ora never reaching to cloak me with pink raiment,
violet-scattered.  I balance precariously on my scallop shell, its
harsh edges brittle under my toes.  I shiver as Zephyr and Aura
blow their moist breath on my shoulder, standing lonely in the
stella maris, consumption squatting in my lungs.

He loved me, dear Sandro, middle-aged and barrel-shaped
though he was, was buried devoted at my feet in Ognissanti,
deposed by Leonardo and Michelangelo.  I had a surfeit of
attention.  Medicis and all the wealthy men of Florence called me
beautiful, while my poor husband Mario stood aside, watching
me cough myself to an early death, immortal only on canvas.

Visitors in past centuries would sit for hours before me,
staring at the sea blue sky, the meadow violets,
wondering whether I was designed to look as flat as an Etruscan vase,
noticing the expensive alabaster powder Sandro used to heighten tones,
taking in the allegory, humanist metaphor and mythological reference.

This morning they cram in, a rabble, sweating, pushing,
shoving through the doorway, swearing, complaining of queues
snaking around the Piazza, twisting and turning like my
golden hair.  They don’t look at me with their eyes, but through
cameras or iPad, taking photos of themselves with phones on
long sticks.  They don’t see how Plato’s divine love inspired my beauty.
They tick me off their list.

I have remained exposed for centuries, eternally shy,
vulnerable, a birth with no death, victim of man’s lust, unable
to cover or hide.  Sandro painted me after my mortal end,
captured my soul half-earthbound, half-heavenly, on a tilting sea,
at the mercy of mythical winds.  I watch years pass,
multilingual guides screeching for attention,
detect how blind they have become.