Matrix

by Lauren Groff

everyone knew beauty to be the external sign of god’s favor.

May evil done to others rebound upon the evildoers.

gentlefolk have strange desires and there is no profit in judging them, for all godly folk of the church know that the flow of judgment like the flow of water must go not up but down, alas.

she is less uncouth in writing, more like the self she yearns to become.

The wise inherit honor, but fools get only shame,

she is learning to control her emotions to give her sisters peace in the world.

If one looks hard at even the most powerful magic, one can see nimble human hands,

Yet if there is no inner reading, how can there be any inner life?

It is hard to compete with a holy loner.

kicks a cat over the wall. She feels no remorse. She has always hated a cat.

For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable

it was Marie’s unbeauty that was the making of her.

Since she had been a seed in her mother’s womb Marie had been molded by others, her mother, her ferocious aunts, her books, her money; that the queen had more hand in making Marie by sending her to the abbey than she had in making herself. She was given everything, not least a great blessing of ugliness,

For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.