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Two Poems by Emily Bilman


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.





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