Fire-Born Light was originally written as a poem with the potential to be set to music and emerged from work developed for a song-lyrics seminar two years earlier. The piece is shaped by the author’s long-standing engagement with the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy, particularly his poem Walls, as well as by the Christian Orthodox prayer The Creed (To Symbolo tis Pisteos).
Drawing on the phrase φως εκ φωτός (light from light), the poem reworks it into φως εκ πυρός (fire-born light), shifting the spiritual reference toward a more fragile and volatile source of illumination. Through this transformation, the poem reflects on human reliance on various forms of comfort and belonging—relationships, religion, culture, ethnicity, and other people—and invites readers to consider the consequences of their choices and the roles they play in shaping their own realities and futures.
You, the Normal Ones was written for submission to the Greek literary magazine Storywits and published in its December 2025 issue. The poem is rooted in the melancholic atmosphere of the Christmas period, a time when harmony, happiness, and perfection are often socially imposed.
The text reflects on the pressure to conform to predefined models of living, behaving, and feeling, questioning the sincerity of love and acceptance within such frameworks. At its core, the poem asks how genuine care can exist without acceptance, and how much of what is presented as “normal” or “natural” is, in fact, learned and unexamined from the earliest moments of life.
The translation was provided by Marrie Sanida, author’s English teacher, whose valuable contribution is warmly acknowledged.
The project is part of the subtheme The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.
Author
Nadia Papaioannou
Nadia Papaioannou writes poems, monologues, prose texts, and song lyrics. Her practice is shaped by participation in a wide range of art seminars focused on character creation for monologues, poetry, song lyrics, creative writing through philosophy, theatre, and camera acting.
She has taken part in the ACHIEVE CCS programme, a European sisterhood initiative fostering connection, artistic exchange, and empowerment among women artists. Through this programme she obtained a Youthpass certificate, as well as a Europass certificate from the Erasmus+ project Euroarts (Cyprus, October 2023). She was also a member of the Greek team in the youth exchange programme In and Out (Berlin and Athens, September 2022), which focused on research theatre.
Her work has received several distinctions. In 2022, she won second place in the creative writing competition Write a Letter to Your 13-Year-Old, organised by Hobby Festival, Mikro Polytexneio, and Filntisi Publishing. In 2025, she received third prize in the 5th Panhellenic Literature Competition by Kefalos Publishing in the category Music Lyric for her work Anthogyali (The Vase).
Four of her texts have been published. Anthogyali (The Vase) appears in the 5th Literature Competition Book by Kefalos Publishing, while The Memory, You, the Normal Ones, and Sterile Land have been published in the Greek literary magazine Storywits, available online in Greek with audio versions. Her poem Nasty Voices is scheduled for publication by the Litterateurs’ Guild of Northern Greece in the coming months.
