29 | Poetry by Irina Moga, Winner of the International Dina Sahyouni Literary Prize
Planet of Regrets
Have you been living on this planet of regrets for a while now?
Have you inhabited sand dunes
whipped by winds
that snake through
an unmapped journey towards the frozen Canadian north
their traces muted by drops of resin and ash-grey splinters of
birch bark?
Have you perceived your presence on Earth as an intermittent ache?
Sensed the malformed tension of the sun?
A simulacrum of spring, from which our lives unfold
in short bursts of seasons, each one unfixed,
spinning the story of
a Mendeleev table element,
a labyrinth without a method,
— remanence of
an earlier geological era.
Have you watched lake waters falter under the autumn light?
Acknowledged the lure of words that twist your fate?
Because:
there is no turning back now —
we have liftoff in the UFO.
Have you been living on a planet of regrets?
Irina Moga
Irina Moga is a Romanian-born Canadian poet and author of several poetry books. Her latest collection of poems, Variations sans palais, published with Éditions L’Harmattan (France), was awarded the inaugural literary prize Dina Sahyouni in 2022. Irina’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as: Canadian Literature, carte-blanche, PRISM International online, Foreign Literary Journal, NYQ Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @pictopoems.
Editor’s Note: Recently, Irina and the other twelve members of the Poets Thirteen were nominated for the Pushcart Prize by this publishing house for their renku, “Quantum Entanglement,” which appeared in the debut issue of The Lotus Tree Literary Review.