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# furies | by Therese Doherty
- URL: https://www.medusarising.org/furies-by-therese-doherty/
- Published: 2025-05-20T16:13:08.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-02T18:49:33.000Z
- Description: black is our colour, darkness our home / and red blood flows through our chthonic bodies / its own bright unlight
- Author: Medusa Rising
- Tags: Poetry, RadMatFem

lighting lightless eyes with fury  
that motion through emotion – anger – arrives  
teller of troubling truths, revealer of wrongs

we’ve been told, we women, not to feel it  
certainly not to show it  
so unladylike, so inappropriate

but we do feel it

who can blame us?  
we are human, after all  
wilfully wronged and restrained  
forced into shapes not our own

taught no other way  
we push our anger down, hold it in  
feel it thickening in our throats  
until our voices flee

*this is what they want*

rage flares within  
burns our hearts to black  
and we cannibalise ourselves  
until all that remains are empty  
silent shells

*they delight at this*

what they do not understand  
– and what we are remembering – is that  
black is our colour, darkness our home  
and red blood flows through our chthonic bodies  
its own bright unlight

we endure because life endures  
(despite hollowness and enforced silence)  
by virtue of the dark  
its womblike circumference  
its still sanctuary

and because of that pure, beautiful blackness  
they do not see  
when our shells ossify, become armour  
that protects us as we sprout  
wide shadowy wings that fly us to freedom

then we open our throats and speak truth  
singing serpent-tongued and winged  
as we always were  
for it is our furies that show us the way

---

**Therese Doherty** lives with chronic illness and occasionally writes and makes art, but mostly just reads a lot. She can be found here: [@offeringsfromthewellspring](https://www.instagram.com/offeringsfromthewellspring/?ref=medusarising.org).

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