Poems by Emily Bilman

THE DREAM CADENCE

Lost in a wild forest where rivers run
At counter cadence, I cannot step
Into the river of my dream. Each clue
Is immediately swept off by the original
Dream that keeps slipping away. Stood I
In an open field or was I celebrating
Our team’s victory? I do not know.
The failed dream escapes me. I reconstruct
A virtual dream to soothe my melancholy
And Zephyr disperses my sadness. The real dream
Remains a wish fulfilled, the poem’s palimpsest.
Memory’s offspring, the real dream restores my breath.
Like the north star that leads the nocturnal way
The accomplished dream palliates the day.

ODE TO THE WATER-SHADOW 

When I make my first steps into
the wide sea and a swarm of juvenile
gilt-breams swirl around my legs,
I linger on the brink of the beryl-beach
like an infatuated maiden moon
my feet submerged in salt-water
sensing the soft skins of the breams
rejoicing in their silver transparencies –
Suddenly as I swim, I feel
frightened by my own shadow
beneath me as if it were the shadow
of a wild thief possessing mine
or the shadows of unknown multitudes
threatening my communion
with the nurturing salt-water
that did bear me as a child.
The gilt-breams still slide
on the diaphanous waters,
their lithe dorsal fins bent down
like folded sails while I dive
head-down into the salt-water
blessing each mineral ion oozing
into my skin, carrying me into
the depths, rendering me weightless.
While I swim back towards the shore
the gilt-breams slither upon the breaths
of soft sands, their spines clasping
their silver-shaded lamella, blending
in their own transparencies,
with their crimson phosphorescent
gills, pumping mineral oxygen
like a marine heart bitter to the taste.  

Dr. Emily Bilman teaches poetry in Geneva, CH. Her dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in 2013 by Peter Lang. Her poetry books, A Woman By A Well (2015), Resilience (2015),  and The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018) were published by Troubador, UK. Poems were published in London Magazine, Salzburg Review, Offshoots, Expanded Field, etc. She blogs on http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman