Where the Furies Pause

by Donald S. Yarab

In myth, the Furies pursue the guilty. In this meditative poem, they do not chase or condemn, but pause—witnesses to memory, silence, and the uncertain balance between reckoning and reprieve. Beneath the yew, they wait—not gone, not appeased, but listening.

Vincent van Gogh, Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888)
Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm
London, Helly Nahmad Gallery — **Vincent van Gogh, *Trunk of an Old Yew Tree* (1888)**
Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm
London, Helly Nahmad Gallery

“Necdum illum aut trunca lustrauerat obuia taxo / Eumenis…”
— Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10

“Nor yet had the Fury met him, bearing the lustral yew…”
— Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10 (adapted translation)

As darkness descends and light abates,
The Furies wake at the turning of fates.
No horn is blown, no omen flies—
Only the hush where judgment lies.

They come not crowned, but cloaked in ash,
With broken names and eyes that flash.
Not wrath alone, but what endures—
The weight of memory that never cures.

They walk where silence used to sleep,
Where secrets rot and letters bleed.
The breath of dusk is cold and tight—
A wound reopens in the night.

By yews they pause, where death takes root,
In soil grown thick with ash and fruit.
The bark is split with silent cries,
The rings record what speech denies.

They do not speak, but still the trees
Murmur of trespass in the breeze.
The wind forgets its mournful tone—
As if the world waits to atone.

A shadow stirs, but does not fall;
A light withdraws, but leaves a call.
No hand is raised, no doom is cast—
And yet the pulse runs through the past.

The air is thick with what might be:
A breaking, or a turning key.
The Furies halt—but do not sleep.
And from the yews, the silence… deep.

So still they stand beneath the yew—
The Furies veiled in dusk’s soft hue.
Its needles dark, its berries red,
It shelters both the quick and dead.

They neither strike nor turn away,
But hold the hush at break of day.
Their eyes are dark, their purpose blurred—
As if they wait to hear a word.

The Orange Sentinels

In honor of the seasonal watchmen of the Ohio Turnpike

My friend John W. called me while he was traveling the Ohio Turnpike and noted the abundance of orange barrels delaying his journey. I quickly quipped that he should be happy the Orange Sentinels, for which Ohio is justly famed, were guarding his way. And then I composed the following short poem in his honor—and in honor of the Sentinels lining his path:

The Orange Sentinels
Each spring, they bloom—
Not in gardens, but on shoulders and medians,
Where asphalt warms and groans beneath the sun.
Tall and mute, they stand in solemn rows,
Garbed in Day-Glo regalia,
Their mission unclear, their presence unyielding.
Some say they guard progress, others delay.
To us, they are the high priests of frustration,
An order eternal, sanctioned by no god we trust.
Ohio’s own bitter blossom.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877)
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in)
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit — James McNeill Whistler, *Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket*
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

Elegy for the Automatons: A Reflection on Political Decline in the Orwellian State

The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico
(1916-18, oil on canvas) — The Disquieting Muses (1916-18) by Giorgio de Chirico
(97.16 cm × 66 cm, oil on canvas)

Preface

This poem, Elegy for the Automatons, was inspired by George Packer’s article The Hollow Men, which appeared in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic. Packer’s article examines the political and moral collapse of certain American officials—Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who, once defenders of democratic principles, surrendered themselves to the inverted realities demanded by Donald Trump’s authority and his increasingly Orwellian authoritarian state.

Echoing the pivotal scene in Orwell’s 1984 where a Party orator is handed a note and instantly redirects his vitriol toward a different enemy “mid-sentence, without a pause,” Packer documents how key Republican figures performed their own breathtaking reversal on Ukraine policy, and describes how these officials pivoted instantly from celebrating Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s aggression to denouncing Ukraine as the enemy—all in service to Trump’s shifting personal allegiances and contempt for democratic values.

Packer also invokes Henri Bergson’s insight that the mechanical within the human evokes both laughter and horror. Yet what he describes transcends mechanical reflex: it is the slow hollowing-out of conscience itself. Once-thoughtful men become fluent automatons, mouthing words disconnected from belief, loyalty, or memory.

This poem seeks to render in elegiac form the sorrowful descent of a free polity into ritualized untruth, and the transformation of human beings into instruments of submission.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Elegy for the Automatons

In the year when the hollowing began,
and Orwell’s warning stirred too late,
it came not by fire nor iron decree,
but smiling, in the face of one man.
He bore no heavy crown, no burning sword;
only the gift of inversion:
truth was a lie, loyalty a whim,
freedom the mask of power.
A man for whom cruelty was a virtue,
and truth a broken toy at his feet;
a man who measured loyalty by abasement,
and called the strong weak and the weak strong.

Under his gaze, the names of enemies blurred,
history curled back on itself like smoke;
words, having lost their anchor, floated
as banners torn from any mast.
And a people once proud of remembering
forgot that they had ever known another day.

From this hour of unmooring
emerged the hollowing of men.

Johnson, first among the fallen,
fumbled for strength among hollow phrases,
mouth heavy with the weight of borrowed words.
Behind his thickened glass, a flicker died—
and he mistook its ashes for light.

Graham, quick to find the favor of the wind,
circled the ruin with the laughter of forgetting,
shedding oaths like old garments,
spinning from vow to vow as a moth to a dying flame,
faithless to all but the empty crown of belonging.

Rubio, once proud in the defense of liberty,
sank into the yellow chair of forgetting,
listening to the slow departure of his own voice.
Once he cried for the dignity of nations;
now he stitched the banners of surrender with empty hands.

Thus were men unmade,
not by terror, nor by war,
but by the patient grinding of truth into noise,
by the slow machinery of convenience and fear.

And we, who watched,
sang no hymns for these men,
built no statues to mark their days.
They passed like shadows over a broken dial,
automatons grinding down the hour,
till even the dust forgot their tread.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, February 28, 2025 — slipping deeper into the hollowing of the soul.

The Unopened Book

by Donald S. Yarab

**Scholar in His Study** by *Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1634*
Oil on canvas, 141 × 135 cm
Collection of the National Gallery Prague, Schwarzenberg Palace
© National Gallery Prague

The unopened book, its spine uncreased,
rests on the shelf, untouched by breath.
No hand has turned its waiting leaves,
no eye has met its silent depths.

The pages sleep in folded time,
ink unmoved by thought or light—
a universe uncalled to mind,
a star unkindled in the night.

Who knows what worlds it might contain—
a lover’s vow, a tyrant’s fall,
a name that once was yours or mine,
a deathless truth, a whispered call?

The story never yet begun
is writ in ink that does not fade.
Its fate, unlike the morning sun,
has neither risen nor decayed.

And yet—another book lies bare,
its binding worn, its chapters told.
The margins smudged by time and care,
its tale rehearsed a thousandfold.

We read, we skip, we turn again,
we bookmark thoughts we dare not bind—
then falter near the closing lines,
no meaning fixed, no end designed.

A narrative half-read, half-lost,
its final thought left unexpressed—
the thread unwinds, the ink runs dry,
the reader dozes, unconfessed.

Between the two—a paradox:
the never read, the half-complete.
Which holds the weight of what we are?
Which better marks our own defeat?

Perhaps all books are mirrors dim,
reflecting what we dare not see:
the start we fear, the end we flee,
the truths we touch but never free.

So let it lie, unopened still,
or let it fall apart, well-worn—
the soul is both the waiting page,
and every word we leave unborn.

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Preface

Betwixt the Spheres

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Preface

Elegy for the Automatons

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