Author: Emily Bilman
The Gist
Dr. Emily Bilman teaches poetry in Geneva as London’s Poetry Society’s Stanza representative. 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. Poems were published in The London Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Offshoots, San Antonio Review, Expanded Field, Poetics Research, Oxford School of Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry. She blogs on http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman
The New Order
The minotaur is captive in the poem’s labyrinth.
The beast feeding on sacrificial human flesh
Will only forsake the trap when the poet’s torments
Subside like the ill wind that sinks the pirate ships.
Until then, it must dwindle within the maze,
Trying to figure the way out. The king believes
Human sacrifice protects the harbor and his ships,
Yet he cannot bid the minotaur’s savagery
Nor the poet’s life-force that sustains the poem.
Like the ingenious Ariadne, the poet unravels
The thread leading out of the labyrinth to save
Regal Theseus who slays the wild beast.
The sonnet’s turn points to an order of courage
Distorting the price of human sacrifice.
