After Salvador Dali’s “Sueno causado par el vuelo de una Abeja”, 1944
Dali’s goddess of fecundity floats On the rock of nudity like a pomegranate Bursting open with lucent crimson seeds. She is dreaming of Bernini’s celestial elephant, Levitating between Dali’s earth and the cerulean sky On the lithe arachnid legs of her own wishful memory. Now a bee buzzes inside the canvas: A pomegranate spawns an orange fish That begets a predatory feline suspended In mid-air. With drawn-out claws, a tiger Leaps towards her and touches her ar With the surrealist painter’s phallic bayonet. Yet, still sleeping, she dreams of Bernini’s Obelisk – The emblem of Dali’s inspiration, his solar libido To which she’ll respond when the bee stings her breasts.
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, CH. Three poetry books, A Woman By A Well, Resilience, and The Threshold of Broken Waters were published by Troubador, UK. 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 The 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 a digital ekphrastic publication. Her latest poetry book, Apperception, was published by Troubador in September 2020. Her short fiction piece “The Gun” appeared in Talking Soup.
