The Life-Tree

After Leonora Carrington’s painting

Can I survive the very light I created
Irradiating from the godhead
Surrounded by protective angels?

The divine quintessence in human form
even wanes the crescent moon 
while it lights the stars and nebulae
from within, as in a poem,
whereas two philosophers 
wearing tawny cloaks, with winged 
beasts lying below their feet, 
argue about the essence of truth.

Is truth enlightenment from within 
like a crystal lamp lit on a grief-veined
night, a darkness wherein roam hybrid
hyenas, lions or ligers, their passions
neutralized on paper and the canvas?

Dr. Emily Bilman is London’s Poetry Society Stanza representative in Geneva. Her doctoral 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), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018), and Apperception (2020) were all published by Troubador, UK.

Oscar Lopez Lule is a Mexican American digital artist from Santa Cruz whose work is focused on Mexican rural culture from deserts to small towns in central Mexico that showcase how the richest parts of countries aren’t always the cities with the most tourist attraction. Many subjects in his work appear with colors streaming from the environment into the person to convey how the soil is a present and vital part of every person on this planet.