Dr. Emily Bilman is London Poetry Society’s Stanza representative in Geneva where she lives and teaches poetry. Her dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in 2013 by Peter Lang. Two of her poetry books, Resilience, and A Woman By A Well were published by Troubador, UK in 2015. Her poems, essays, and translations of Neruda and Valéry appeared in The Battersea Review, Hunger Mountain, The High Window, The Journal of Poetics Research, Tuck Magazine, Offshoots, Expanded Field, and London Magazine. “The Tear-Catcher” won the first prize for depth poetry in The New York Literary Magazine. She edits and writes poems and essays for an digital ekphrastic publication www.paintedpoetry.org. Her latest poetry book, The Threshold of Broken Waters, was published by Troubador in September 2018. Her short fiction piece “The Gun” has appeared in Talking Soup. She blogs on her website: http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman
The Mask of the Dream
I tried to reach the forgotten dream.
I ripped off the mask from my lover’s face
to recollect the hints of my dream
buried in the dunes of memory.
My lover’s face galled by the wind
floated upon the river that captivated him.
Hard on seduction, his mask revealed
the betrayal he had hidden from me .
His mask watched and waited for him
like the spirit that makes us recollect
some cues in our dream-labyrinths
until we reach the original memory –
the source of our troubled wishes,
haunting us while we are wide-awake.
We dream again and again
to catch cues retrievable in our dreams
that assure the passing of our lives
until the lover’s mask regains his face.
Unrequited
Upon Pegasus we rode, silk-wings
Transparent against the moonlight
The mirror of our anguish and flight.
The night trembled with new-born terror
While you dreamed the nightmares
Of the obscure frameless forest
The blind bile-pool you failed
To contain. Our excess desire
Was quelled into an unrequited love
Locked within this irregular sonnet
Whose anguish was subdued
By writing these wishful words
And from the white pentimento page
A hundred starlings took their flight
In my perpetual daydreams to alight.