O Masons lay thy bricks of stone
To build your archways and causeways
To build your temperate domes.
The structure was grand.
However, among the stones
There lay a stone oddly shaped,
Which had a strange appearance
And no goodly form.
The masons laid their brick
Casting the oddly shaped stone
Over their shoulders.
Soon, the architecture was perfect,
The building’s scaffolding tall,
But it had one structural weakness.
The builders looked over the gap
Where the corner stone needed laid.
No stone fit.
Yet, lying on the marble tiles
Was the stone the builders rejected.
They took it, gazed upon it,
And saw it perfectly fit in the gap.
A strong stone,
A tried stone, and a true stone.
It bore all the weight of the dome and the arches.
It soon came that renovators needed to rebuild the structure.
They poked and prodded,
Wishing to do their renovations just.
They examined all of the foundations,
All of the scaffolding.
It all only needed minor renovations.
Nothing so grand or more than plastering and some buttressing.
Yet, they came to the corner stone
Which held the dome and arches.
It was a homely little stone
So the builders wished to replace it
With a gem.
They removed the stone
And placed their own, fresh cut stone of ruby into the gap.
However, the ruby did not quite fit.
Nor was it the perfect shape like the other stone was.
No matter how well did the masons cut their stone
The piece could not fit.
Soon the arches began to sag
The dome began to buckle
The foundation began to shift from the heavy burden of the dome and archways.
The ruby stone could not hold the weight of the structure.
So, the masons looked once again on the stone they had rejected,
Seeing it could still yet fit into the gap.
They did so, and it stopped the damage from altogether getting worse.
B. K. Neifert 