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 Sep 13
Anais Vionet
Quick break-up Senryus.
Pick one to quickly, cut that
relationship cord:

I'm sorry, What'd you say?
I can't hear you (confused look)
- we’re breaking up.

You’re the guy that
every girl at our school wants
- it's their lucky day.

It's time that we took
our relationship to the
previous level.

I still cherish the
initial misconceptions
I had about you.
.
.
Songs for this:
Love on the Rocks by Lizzie Mintz
Lovefool by The Cardigans
Nothing Can Stop Us by Saint Etienne
Forever by X-Cetra
~
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!

~
 Sep 13
Elizabeth Kelly
This song is written on my heart.
Each note hangs in the air before turning to smoke
and we inhale it here in your little bed,
breathe it in as we have most nights since you were born.

Not so long ago
I was someone else
Who was not your mother.
You don’t know her,
the Me who spent months of her young life poring over the sheet music.
I still have it, teenage pencil scratch covering the entire first movement.
“Sticky top notes” and “written when he was going deaf!” and rows of chord forms,
glyphs,
a cipher.

(Did you know:
Beethoven was dead when Ludwig Rellstab compared the famous first movement of his Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor to moonlight shining on a lake?
The sonata previously entitled “Quasi una fantasia.” Almost a fantasy.
The sonata written in blood from a broken body and a broken heart.
Poor dead Beethoven. Our art is truly not our own).

It strikes me odd
that a song such as this one
has become what it has become.
Radiance in despair, I suppose,
is universal in its bright raw frankness.
We stare. It stares back.

Tonight, blessedly,
that chasm of grief alive still and forever in the delicate weaving vines of plaintive melody stemming darkly from it
is far from your door.
Your breaths are slow and even now.
The song closes,
as it always does,
trying and failing to claw out of the darkness.

But you don’t know that.

Tonight it’s just a beautiful song.
And I am no one else
but your mother.
 Sep 13
Bekah Halle
Baths outside --
It's a country thing...

After a hard day’s work
of rounding up the cattle,
fixing fences fast and
grounding the grass, you’ll mantle
the horses and red-hot stamp them...

You may break for brunch:
coffee (necessary) and a bite to eat,
But then it’s back on your feet.
More jobs to greet..

Then, when the sun starts setting,
slipping behind the slopes, staged in the set background,
as it's done on 'McLeod's Daughter's' and ‘Yellowstone’ —
You throw off your clothes and get right in
to the outside bath,
And soak off the grime from your worn out bones.

Sip a cold beer, or shot a wild whiskey, with relieving cheer!
"ahhhhhhhhhhhh!"
 Sep 12
JAMIL HUSSAIN
I am but dust in colourful silken dress,
Yet I was sent to heal, to touch and to bless.
Where words divide and swords increase —
Let fragrance speak the song of peace.

In gardens torn by human pride,
I bloom where peace and hope have died.
And if you breathe me, still and deep,
My scent shall wake what hate would keep.

So lay your weapons, hush your tongue —
The world is old, but love is young.
And through the quiet, let me be
A rose of peace for all to see.
A Rose of Peace 12/09/2025 © All Rights Reserved by Jamil Hussain
 Sep 12
irinia
I can't leave aside the latitude of your eye
where roads and memories reside
my dreams
more than my shadow crash into you
my lips conjure your scent
my insinuated hand  does not hold
does not hold anything tangible
words are wounds, the meanings flow
angles intersect and lines converge
to the proof or woof of your existence
in this poem the words laugh
at the fragile calculus of tears
as if they would celebrate the question mark
in an unfinished sentence
I wonder where your touch begin, how far
the eye can stretch into the camera obscura of flesh
 Sep 11
Bree
1983.
They homeschool at three.
Buried in junk mail.
Lines, curves and words.
Four and mommy
Teacher and daddy
Principle.
Lie. No outside. Men's law is not God's Law.
Babies come in a few fold.
Oldest resources resourced.
Ladies of old.
Doily and all, almost forgotten.
Stealth and sixteen.
Homeschool all for three.
Work at CoCo's age fifteen, hostess
With the ultimate mostess.
Abandoned dreams lost to babies
Three.
CoCo's, community college and me.
Saturation graduation milked and donned
For lessons.
Job well done.
#fuckhomeschooling
 Sep 11
irinia
Thus, like the skin
of a shorn ewe, the day rises.

It is difficult to skin the self from a stone.
It is difficult to skin memory from a Greek.

But why should we talk about these!
After all,
light too has a skin,
light too can be skinned...
So
light too is guilty of being.

A gust of fresh air
comes with the millennium.
We are beautiful;
why should we not be beautiful?

We eat one another
only from hunger,
from adoration,
from structure,
from love.
It doesn't matter.
We are what we are,
that is, beautiful.

I carry my ever still blood
in my heart.
I carry my ever salt tear
in my eye.

I carry the angel in the middle of heaven.

by Nichita Stanescu
 Sep 11
Elizabeth Kelly
Full moon in Pisces,
aching broken fullness
desperate, hungry fullness.
Alarming.

We’ve been here before, you and I.

Ah, you give yourself away -
a lingering hand,
the curve of the small of my back
alive, electric,
hot beneath hot fingers,
fabric barrier thin and waning,
pressed.

We’ve been here before.

There is supple space,
a secret green bud
within the tangle of autumnal shed
for you for you,
thought dead now glowing
hot and red
tenderly doomed,
a September tomato.

Pluck while it’s still green;
we both agreed
there’s no other way to go
but to seed.
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