by: Emily Bilman
Like water-swathes, Time, I thought,
Contains hours that differ within the day.
When the halcyon breeze eases my breath
Time, like iodine, seems organic.
The day becomes a tabula rasa, a mirror
On which we project ourselves.
Like a room filled with familiar objects
The day’s events fill our minds
But sleep and dream clean the day
And each day seems brand new.
Like the envelope of our life-span
Containing the fragments of our past
That we remember and often forget,
Would Time, in its indivisible integrity,
Be itself a dream that remains entire
Despite its inchoate fragments?
Dreams, like Time, the recollected
And even the forgotten ones, clear
The city’s remainders from its rubble,
Within its tattered slums, spread eerily
Into suburbs like mushrooms, and
The mind becomes like a slate-shaft.
An egg holding the yolk and albumen
Of poems, Time, remains whole
In an ever-expanding present,
Tangible like the land yielding fruit
A present we do not wish to curtail
Nor stain with the wrong ingredients.
A river flows into our ever transient
Life-sea. The land yields barley and corn.
The mind, in sustenance, integrates
Disparate dream-images. Like ocean currents,
The present is the flow of self into
The self that recognizes the other.
The present is Time regenerate.
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About the author
Emily Bilman is London’s Poetry Society Stanza representative in Geneva.
Her theses, 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), The Threshold
of Broken Waters (2018), and Apperception (2020) were published by
Matador, UK. Poems were published in The London Magazine, Poetry
Salzburg, Offshoots, San Antonio Review, Expanded Field, Poetics Research,
The Blue Nib, Poetica Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Ex Tempore, North of
Oxford Journal, Otherwise Engaged Magazine, Wild Court, The High Window.
She blogs on http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman
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