Quarry Walls

You should have seen the granite face,
the sixty-foot walls ash and gray.
I stood in the emptied chamber,
the heart
of so much land taken away -
taken as stones in chunks, to be pummeled and pounded,
burned into a chalky powder.
They took the earth from its place to make of it something useful.
They stripped the diverse and dense hills - the land of pine and birch and oak, the home of white-tail and vulture and finch.
They made of it a scraggly ruin of fallen stone.
Extracted except for piles at the base of the transgressed walls.
And for what?
To take the rock and return it not into the land, but upon it,
as roads,
as pavement,
and harshness.
So, I was not surprised
to see the weeping walls,
the water running from the cliffs and through the crevices,
crying upon the granite face,
frozen in places.
Transgression and harm.

My heart may have fallen prey to despair, but for the life I saw
in the walls and in the air,
in the geese and in the doe.
For even the marred land is still living,
the very tears streaming down the face and emptying into that quarry floor -
that was rejuvenation
God reclaiming
rebuilding
the Kingdom come,
in steady persistence,
in a way - thanks be to God -
deeper and more sustained than the violence
we visit upon the earth
in our days as grass and struggle.
We shall be overcome
when the river pours not only from granite
but from heaven
to earth's empty floor.

Wes