Posted by Rattle:

The following poem was written by Karol Wojtyla when he was in his 20's, during the war. It was a time when friends, colleagues, and teachers were being shipped off to concentration camps. His father, who he was extremely close to, had recently passed away. Karol had escaped imprisonment and death at the hands of the Germans several times by this point, and was working in the inhuman conditions of a rock quarry to avoid deportation. This poem recounts when a fellow worker standing next to him was killed. Several miles away, untold numbers of people were being put to death in bulk at Auschwitz. Several years later, he would enter the priesthood.

The Quarry

He wasn't alone.
His muscles grew into the flesh of the crowd, energy their pulse,
As long as they held a hammer, as long as his feet felt the ground.
And a stone smashed his temples and cut through his heart's chamber.
They took his body and walked in a silent line
Toil still lingered about him, a sense of wrong.
They wore gray blouses, boots ankle-deep in mud.
In this, they showed the end.
How violently his time halted: the pointers on the low voltage dials jerked, then dropped to zero again.
White stone now within him, eating into his being, taking over enough of him to turn him into stone.
Who will lift up that stone, unfurl his thoughts again under the cracked temples?
So plaster cracks on the wall.
They laid him down, his back on a sheet of gravel.
His wife came, worn out with worry; his son returned from school
Should his anger now flow into the anger of others?
It was maturing in him through his own truth and love
Should he be used by those who came after, deprived of substance, unique and deeply his own?
The stones on the move again; a wagon bruising the flowers.
Again the electric current cuts deep into the walls.
But the man has taken with him the world's inner structure, where the greater the anger, the higher the explosion of love.

The Quarry, by Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II)