Then a thought came back to her which made the color rise in her cheek and a spark light itself in her eyes. She straightened her thin little body and lifted her head.
“Whatever comes,” she said, “cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.”
Making a Statement
Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper’s Bazaar while waiting at the dentist’s to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, “Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won’t Be Naked.”
Molly Ivins
The Fate of Arcelia
When the round of life is broken
with the breaking of the year;
When the orphan and the widow
weep in darkness and in fear;
When the kin of Vale have weakened
till they cannot bear the load;
When the heartless masters beat them
to their knees under the goad;
When the people are divided
from each other and the land;
When their holdings are abandoned
into few and grasping hands;
When the land cannot lie fallow,
but is stripped of all it bears;
When the dead cannot lie easy
in the land that once was theirs;
When the poor man’s debts shall drive him
into thralldom for his bread;
And the people shall fall silent
in the shadow of their dread;
_-_Volga_Boatmen_(1870-1873).jpg)
Then, in hunger, crops shall dwindle
under flood and slip and frost;
To a foreigner’s dominion
shall the land at last be lost.
from Restoration Day by Deborah Makarios