Dr. Emily Bilman is a widely published and anthologised author of poetry, literary essays and short stories. Her PhD dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010. Slatkine & amp; Cie published La rivière de soi (2010) in Geneva, CH. Modern Ekphrasis (2013) came out with Peter Lang Academic, CH. Her other poetry books, A Woman by A Well (2015), Resilience (2015), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018), Apperception (2020) and The Undertow (2023), were all published in the UK by Troubador Books. Her sonnet 'Pathfinder' is scheduled to arrive on the moon’s southern pole via a NASA time-capsule in 2024 and is published in The Polaris Trilogy, edited by J. Brinkman, J. Heithaus, J. Reed, B. Harris (Brick Street Poetry Inc., 2023), p.4.
THE SHADOW TAMER
The seeded sky impregnated the rainclouds.
She breathed in the musk-filled petrichor
and felt the disentangled shadows clarify
her projections built by her breaths as if
she were unravelling her dishevelled hair.
She had felt fractured and turned
her back to her darkened shadow-self
as the sun-glare reached its zenith
over the lichen-valley. As she moved
away from her shadow, the purified flare
of creased leaves near the elms
clarified her sight. She gradually grew
receptive to the immediacy of passion.
Attuned to her heartbeat, she felt alive.
POISE
like the magnolia pistils,
white against the window
in the early autumn light,
poise is the secret that keeps
the stars in their right place –
like the magnolia’s stigma, I discern the porcelain flower-pot
and the pale petal on the open page and keep his heart in mine –
pliant and poised.