Poetry

Daiga Ellaby photo

By

Emily Bilman

GRAVIDA (i)

As the foetus grew in me among my body’s

Hills and grasses, I grew as euphoric as

The sprawling ochre-and-white winged alpine

Kite on its wind-torn trajectory off the beaten track.

Hormone-rivers watered my body, generative as

My husband’s fertilizers upon the fermented fields.

As the embryo’s energy unfurled in me, I was interviewed

At a city lab, baked cakes, invited our friends,

And trimmed our country house with antique

Oak furniture, silk carpets, and old copper recipients:

Milk-vessels, huge cauldrons, etched pewter plates.

By late mid-pregnancy, sheep were shorn for wool

While our son’s nursery, with his stroller and

Musical mobile above his bed, sifted the sun-

Light from the purple hills beyond the horizon.

GRAVIDA (ii)

Like my husband’s fermented foodstuff

Budding in the sheep’s gut-flora, the embryo

Grew inside me until the waters broke at

Three in the morning after a family picnic

At the confluence of two rivers forming a single

Source. Binary stars started spurting their slow

Celestial gist for hours without end as my son traversed

The sultry tunnel that left him breathless at birth

Until his lungs could cry out under his father’s aegis.

I held him against my body in perfect symbiosis

Every day when my husband surprised us in the clinic with

A bantam cock and bantam hens and to celebrate the birth.

Emily Bilman

Dr. Emily Bilman is a freelancer and London’s Poetry Society Stanza representative in Geneva where she hosts poetry meetings in her home. She earned her PhD from  East Anglia University where she taught literature and critical theory. Her dissertation entitled, The Psychodynamics of Poetry, was published in 2010 by Lambert Academic Publishing in Germany. Modern Ekphrasis,dealing with the poetry-painting analogy from Plato to Derrida, was published by Peter Lang, Switzerland in 2013. Her ms. Melville’s Metaphysics and The Ambiguity of Good and Evil is yet unpublished. Her  interdisciplinary essays on psychoanalytical theory and literature were published in The T.S. Eliot Journal, The Battersea Review no. 5; The Journal of Poetics Research of Sydney University. They can be read online.

Her poems are published in The London Magazine, The Linnet’s Wings, Hunger Mountain, Offshoots VII, XII, & XIV, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Iodine, Aois 21, Spillwords Press, The Galway Review, The Battersea Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, The Inspired Heart Vols. 1, 2, 3, & 4,  Ygdrasil, Tuck Magazine, Snob.ru, The Journal of Poetics Research, and  www.ekphrastic.net  For her ekphrastic research she edits and writes for the digital publication www.paintedpoetry.org. Her poetry books, A Woman By A Well and Resilience, are published by Matador, UK. She was recently awarded the first prize for « The Tear-Catcher » by The New York Literary Magazine and her poems were broadcast on Bashani Radio, New York. She blogs on  http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman