It survived the loud, jostling train

from Baden to Berlin, and the heave

and slant, the pitch, pivot, and lean

of the bad boat to New York.

She held it to her in a hatbox

stuffed with husks, all across steerage

and Pennsylvania, down the slow road

of the Ohio River to Cairo

and up the dirt tracks and coal-

paved paths to Frankfort, Illinois,

her sudden husband, her life.

She was mined for the children

in her, one daughter, then another,

a short seam, quick to clay,

and not a single son to save them.

But each December found her unfolding

from their sheaths the pale

figures from Dresden: Holy Mother, mild

worker in wood, stock reclined

and ruminant, the infant peering skyward

through His upheld hands. And through the years

we have come to know this story,

how starved, buried on scrip to the company store,

the miner came coal-hearted home,

winter just begun, his daughters already asleep,

and the crèche below a sprig of pine.

How blind in the peripheral light, unhelmeted

to rage, he crushed the manger and the tiny Lord

in his blackened right hand,

spat the woman in her face,

and left that night and never returned.