What is stone? What is a marble block
That a human hand may attack it, the cold one,
[That it] wishes, from out of the dead thing, to peel, to extract
The warm life-blood of a human body?

For we are created in an eternal image,
That we thus seek to immortalize ourselves
Out of the time-bound primordial rock wall,
Where the cracks from the wars of the Titans gape?

Your mallet struck the deepest question of interpretation.
You saw the LORD in the hour of Creation,
Holding his crowning work in the balance of [his] gaze.

The clay figure in its final, raw stage,
Already breathing . . . yet HE became tenderly hesitant,
While yet caressing it, gave the creation a milder roundness.