Photo credit: Sylvia Cavanaugh

“A mother is the holiest thing alive.”
	By Samuel Taylor Coleridge, inscribed on the 
	1937 Monument to Mothers, Ashland, Pennsylvania
Last summer I stumbled upon
the Monument to Mothers
while searching for the old family home.
She rises above the scrappy
coal town in a valley too steep
to be recollected easily
like the impoverished Schuylkill County 
of my grandfather’s youth.

Seated like Whistler’s mother,
her skirt a dark wing, stoic.
Hands folded, she rests atop a turret
halfway up an almost vertical hillside
with curving walkways 
and low walls topped with granite blocks
chiseled into blades.

In the depths of the Depression
the Ashland Boys Association
pooled their few dollars
to build this shrine for mothers.
Mothers who watched their sons
trudge off to the mines
or jobs further afield
sometimes never to return.

Mothers who scrimp and save
and would, like a cabbage leaf,
turn sunshine into sustenance.
Mothers who invent with lard,
scraps of hope, snippets of thread.

This Monument to Mothers,
with its dove-gray sharp-toothed walls 
of metamorphic rock,
proclaims that hardship arises
from the bones of the universe.

It declares that girls who become mothers
inhabit the white space of suffering
which frames everything,
emphasizing the enduring power
of a hallowed gentle touch
of a righteous soft lap
psalms of bedtime stories 
and the balm in Gilead
of holy hot soup and bread.