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September 2025
HP Poet: irinia
Age: 47
Country: Romania


Question 1: We warmly welcome you to the HP Spotlight, irinia. Please tell us about your background?

irinia: "I live in a country with a difficult past, I have complicated memories of the XXth century. I studied foreign languages and literatures (English & German), British cultural studies, psychology and psychotherapy. I worked as a cultural journalist for some time, and as an English teacher for a decade. I love working as a psychotherapist, it is a humbling honour to get to know and be with people in a profound way. I am the mother of a spirited teenage daughter whom I am in love with. I am a highly sensitive person which is a blessing and a curse because I am often times moved by life in an intense way. I am from the Balkans so my taste in everything is rather eclectic."


Question 2: How long have you been writing poetry, and for how long have you been a member of Hello Poetry?

irinia: "I wrote my first poem as a teenager, and I’ve been writing since then discontinuously, whenever poetry came to me. There were periods of intense writing and also long periods of silence. It was difficult to see myself as a poet until relatively recent. On HP I've been since 2010 or 2011, I am not sure, I have to check my first post. This site and the community supported me to keep writing. I owe to HP the existence of my book of poetry called "Psychic retreat" published by Europe Books last year. Thank you Eliot for keeping HP running and thank you to all of you for keeping HP alive. I witnessed this community changing, growing, descending into chaos sometimes. I enjoy the diversity of styles."


Question 3: What inspires you? (In other words, how does poetry happen for you).

irinia: "I am inspired by everything that moves me, especially people, stories, the natural world, history. Poetry simply happens to me, words and images start pouring down in my mind, so I just write them down as they come. I don’t rewrite or work with conscious intention on any poem because I don’t have time to be a „serious“ writer, who has the discipline and toil of writing. At some point poetry started coming to me in English, perhaps because my readings were mostly in English. I think poetry is a way of containing or transforming my emotional processes as for me poetry happens in the presence of feelings, and I am also observing a tendency to be more reflexive or abstract as if when I write there is a witness inside. I feel more and more that I am interested in writing about politics and society too."


Question 4: What does poetry mean to you?

irinia: "It means a lot, I am afraid it is difficult to capture it into words. The poetry of other people touches me deeply, fascinates me, gives me the feeling of awe. It was my constant companion, it was a mirror, I found out about myself through resonance with other poets. Poetry captures the depth of life, our dreams, struggles, aspirations, our joy and our pain, creates alternative worlds from words. It captures the pulse of inner reality while it also mystifies it. It is a space of freedom and play for me. It is a protest. It is an attempt at destroying and recreating the world captured in normal language and used concepts. It is perhaps a measure of our humanity, vulnerability, resilience."


Question 5: Who are your favorite poets?

irinia: "I will start with William Shakespeare as I love his use of language and wit. I love Japanese haiku poetry, their ineffable simplicity is mesmerizing. There are many poets that I adore: Rumi, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Charles Bukowski, William Blake, Robert Browning, T.S. Elliot, the English and German Romantic poets, Nichita Stănescu (Romania), Ana Blandiana (Ro), Florin Iaru (Ro), Mircea Cărtărescu (Ro), Ioana Ieronim (Ro), Gellu Naum (Ro), Nora Iuga (Ro), Paul Celan, Mary Oliver, David Whythe, Anne Sexton, Tibor Zalan (Hungary), Jean-Pierre Siméon (a wonderful poet), Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ana Akhmatova, Viktor Neborak (Ukraine), Marjana Savka (Ukraine), Hrytsko Chubai (Ukraine), John O’Donohue, Rachel Bluwstein, Yehuda Amichai, Nathan Zach, Wislawa Szymborska (Poland), Mahmud Darwish (Palestine), John Donne, Friedrich Hölderlin, Reiner Maria Rilke, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tzvetaeva, Octavio Paz, Garcia Lorca, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Primo Levi."


Question 6: What other interests do you have?

irinia: "I love art in all forms, it moves me and it bemuses me, it stimulates my creativity. I love photography and taking photos, I attended courses in my youth. I am fascinated by cosmos and cosmology, I love physics. I love stand-up comedy, music, dancing, hiking on the mountains. I am interested in history, I am fascinated by the becoming of the world. I am fascinated by the individual and collective psyche, I think this is something that has left a mark on my poetry."


Carlo C. Gomez: “We would like to thank you irinia, we really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to get to know the person behind the poet! It is our pleasure to include you in this Spotlight series!”

irinia: "Many thanks to Carlo for this series and to you all for being here!"




Thank you everyone here at HP for taking the time to read this. We hope you enjoyed coming to know irinia better. We most certainly did. It is our wish that these spotlights are helping everyone to further discover and appreciate their fellow poets. – Carlo C. Gomez

We will post Spotlight #32 in October!

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finally this moment is here, I've been watching
and waiting, I've been hearing it all along
in between your words, in the center of the stories
you tell so eloquently, so clever, so wise

there is light in your right eye, some shadow in your left eye
the evening light is sweetly illuminating the magnitude of loneliness
some feelings need at least two people in order to be bearable

you sat and listened you looked deeper into your body
language receded, obscured itself like the moon
sometimes there is no need for words
something more important needs to be created
in between bodies and minds,
the flow of connection, of true partnership

the waves started, the waters of loneliness surfacing
you cried your tears and I cried mine
as I listened to the silence of tears I understood: this was the moment for a few simple words: I see you, I am here
there is no falling deeper than this for now
truth, this scarry creature, was there in your flesh and in mine
your loneliness was like a sea without horizon but the shiver of depth  like a voice without screaming, a bird without flight

perhaps this tango with tears will fill your lungs with innocence
as you imagine a new horizon, a new architecture for happiness
This is a series of poems about meeting people, about how people pass through my body, my heart and my mind.

"Thus, if a resistance is in operation, it indicates that one is experiencing his or her thoughts or feelings as a danger."
this morning when I opened my eyes
the light was breathing the window had a pulse
as if I was a body with unmystified senses
as if I could see deeper in everything that surrounds me
perhaps a remembrance of how
difficult it was for me to be in the world
with an immense sensitivity to the slightest movement of life around me,
how wondeful to attune to the wind, the leaves, the cacophony of beautiful words and deeds, the harmony in the blinking of strangers, the sway of steps on the streets, the collapse of the waveforms of dreams that we called reality
how hard to have a mind that might understand eventually that truth is complicated or not for every creature on the walks of life.
my essence is vulnerability my strenghts is my weakness for my foolishness there is no cure
don't have to look in the mirror to recognize
my human face, your human face, their faces
late in the night when I close my eyes I see only people, the beauty of the world, the cosmos created through pain, how
the morning of the day I was born was there, and everything was already breathing before me and everything will be still spinning its mystery when this excess of life will rob a last breath from me. I know I will be watching the breath of light, how everything gets illuminated when the time is ripe
were we looking
for the feminine
of our soft hands
no questioning
the nature of daylight
is wonder, we feel it
in our touch
we know the ancient art of
cartography: love memory
death quivers deltas of tears
we taste the starvation of breath
the magnitude of gratitude

we kept the drum of hearts
alight to catch the waves of time
Anna's drum summoned Shiva,
the master of shiver
the god of blood
carrying sage scent in our hair
forgotten paths in our shapes
pink lotus flowers in our wombs
bold desires in our feet
tales of flames in each scar

we recognise each other
greet with a soul reverence
across time across space
we forgive ouselves
our betrayals violations
of a feminine truth
we wait for the men we love
we set ourselves free
from the spinning wheel of pain

we receive
we keep
what is alive
what is dead
still not born
in refused bodies:
the possibility of
kindness

we are women
we are dancers
we sing fiercely,
gently from the
chest of the moon
dedicated to J, A, S, A, S, M, I, A, B, A with gratitude
it's wonderful to come together
desire has no mercy
like a red morning light
tickling your feet
it has me transparent
it has me transformed
into roar, thunder, wave
or quicksand in your hands
till the air in between
is fully charged,
radioactive
and insane
my town
where wild flowers grow
between tram tracks.
there was a time when
it was hardly morning,
no bridge into daylight.

walls had ears,
neighbors had eyes
whispering behind the curtains
there was an emptiness in the guts
of the city
and poetry locked in the drawers,
Borges was read under the blankets
while Dostoievski was  a comforter:
demons were embedded.

yeah, people were clapping and smiling
watching the nub of history, numb
they had a life to live,
what can you say?

one day the radio
burst on in the streets
some were shivering in the attic
"we are free", they said
"we are free",
came the echo in trance

"shhhhh"! said others,
let us wipe the blood
don't disturb the sacrificed
so we can sleep
without dreams

it's Thursday in my town
streets are weary
and our souls are
slowly expanding
Thank you, Eliot, for this choice! I am glad that this poem was chosen for the Daily Poem because for me it is a reminder that people died for freedom and struggled against oppression in times when "Cruelty knits a snare,/And spreads his baits with care", as the poet says. (William Blake, The Human Abstract)
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Listen for the sirens
I'm on a highway
Along the perpendicular streets

Having escaped my killer
There's blood on the windshield
There's blood on my thoughts

The rush of song
I've experienced it all
Yet this is only track four

The night wind slices through
A fracture in me
Two sides of me
Must push on and away from here

Is there something happening
Inside that causes it all to melt?
To stick to the sidewalk?

To form into a river of transfiguration?

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