The word ‘fury,’ as we use it today, implies chaotic, unfocused frenzy, but the Furies themselves embodied justified anger, stemming from an adamantine moral code. In Homer, they are curses made flesh, released upon those who commit a crime or threaten the natural order. Seneca the Younger calls them ‘they who with awful brows investigate men’s crimes and sift out ancient wrongs.’ In Ovid, they are the chthonic guards of souls judged too wicked for paradise.
They are fearsome-looking creatures, unsmiling, uncrying (except, Ovid tells us, when Orpheus plays). They bristle with snakes—in their hair, wreathing their limbs, fastening their garments, held in their hands like whips. They dress in black or blood-red. Sometimes they breathe poison. This grotesque image might seem to be at odds with a righteous heart. But for anyone who might not be blameless, anger with reason and purpose and a will of iron is even more frightening than tumultuous, flailing rage.

Jess Zimmerman, “Anger That Can Save the World: On Justice, Feminism, and the Furies”
(via baredmirror)

endless-unfolding:

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch –
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

—Jane Hirshfield, “Not Yet,” in The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997)