Rebellion With An Actor and A Poet
  
 Kingfish-refugees gathered 
 on the beach, around bonfires
 waiting to end their life-risk on land.
  
 I met an unknown actor by the river, 
 reciting Blake’s “Songs of Innocence 
 and Experience”. He had returned 
 from the river’s congested mouth
 in turmoil like the sacrificial sea. 
  
 The migrants were even more vulnerable 
 than migrating birds, a chorus 
 led to their destinations 
 by millenary magnetic patterns.
  
 Innocent like blades of grass
 their children were lost, severed 
 from their parents, snared
 in lands of cruel egotism.
  
 At last, the actor facing 
 the blood-sea, scarlet 
 with migrant gore, rebelled, 
 voicing Blake’s paradox:
 “Pity would be no more
 If we did not make somebody poor.”
  
 And the sea replied with Blake’s voice:
 “Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.”
  
  
 The Mask of the Dream
  
 I witnessed the cold eyes of greed
 bent on money. I had ripped off the mask 
 from my lover’s terrified face.
  
 I recollected the hints of a forgotten dream
 buried in the dunes of my memory. My lover’s 
 face, galled by the wind, floated upon the river 
 that captivated him. Hard on seduction, his mask
 shielded the betrayal he hid from me.
  
 I had dreamed to reach the source of my troubled
 wishes, haunting me while I was wide-awake –
  
 the dream warranted the passage of time
 as if we were navigated on a cruise ship 
 traversing the seas of our transience.
  
 Like the spirit that makes us recollect 
 dream-cues within sleep’s labyrinths
 my lover’s mask watched out for us 
 until he regained his face after
 his disconcerting disclosure.
  
   

Dr. Emily Bilman teaches poetry in Geneva as London’s Poetry Society’s Stanza representative in Switzerland. 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 The London Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Offshoots, San Antonio Review,  Expanded Field, Poetics Research, Oxford School of Poetry Review, The Battersea Review, The Blue Nib, Poetica Review, E.Ratio, Tipton Poetry Journal. She blogs onhttp://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman