OTMA:
"Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood.
In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again."
"And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers."
- abstracts from "The Death of the Flowers" by William Cullen Bryant
Finally done. I mean, what's a year anyways? In dedication to the brief lives of:
Olga Nicholaievna 1895-1918
Tatiana Nicholaievna 1897-1918
Maria Nicholaievna 1899-1918
Anastasia Nicholaievna 1901-1918
