Anastasya Shepherd

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Category: Poetry

  • London

    The difference between art and ornamentation is provocation. If it provokes thoughts, feelings, actions, opposition – anything but indifference – it is art. (Me, personal communication)

    London is art.

    I wander around the city,
    from pillar to post,
    from juxtaposition to juxtaposition.

    It has a lot of pillars and posts –
    old and contemporary,
    pretentions and utilitarian,
    faux Greek and real concrete.

    I peel it layer by layer:
    Shiny facades concealing ruins,
    ruins prepared to be reorganised,
    rebuilt, repurposed,
    reabsorbed into nostalgia for the past
    or hope for the future.

    Only dead cities are immutable –
    monuments to past hopes of individual success
    and current delusions of national grandeur.
    Gravestones.

    Living cities have to consist of ruins,
    it is a process of recreation,
    flux and flow of people and things,
    moving between loss and hope,
    provoking innovation and outrage.

    London is art.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Teenrager Years

    Curiouser and curiouser,
    down the rabbit hole
    furiouser and furiouser,
    losing your mind and soul,
    filling your lungs with panic,
    nameless, lost in the wood,
    swapping depressed for manic,
    hoody for riding hood.
    Barely understood
    tears form bleeding tears.
    Fight through the turgid wood
    of your teenrager years.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Empty space

    Your voice lulls me to sleep.
    Your snoring fails to keep me up.
    Your moving in bed does not wake me.
    But when you get up in the night
    your absence screams in my ears,
    it prods and pokes at me
    and I wake up with a start,
    finding a loud, obnoxious empty space
    interfering with my sleep.
    I don’t lose sleep over you –
    I loose sleep over the empty space
    where you should be.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Cobbled together

    Today the sky is low overhead.
    It’s paved with clouds – small and hard;
    It presses down, hue and weight of lead.
    You feel hemmed in an empty prison yard.

    Today the sea is cold and oily-still,
    reflecting cobbled sky – grey shades on grey.
    Today the pain is harder to conceal,
    as heavy blankness saps your strength away.

    Today it’s hard to leave the past behind
    you try ignoring sky and sea in vain.
    They press too tight, you panic, deaf and blind.
    It’s hard to move, but harder – to remain.

    You trudge through empty, foggy, silent streets
    the road is uphill. The hill is high.
    One foot in front of other, body leads.
    Insensibly, you walk into the sky

    And on you walk, along the cobbled sky,
    the sea above reflecting endless plain.
    To see the world anew. To say good-bye.
    To greet the sun that burns support away.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Of Rainbows and Fairness

    We long for answers. For a way to clear
    the shadows of doubt from the mind.
    We want uncertainty to disappear,
    confusion and complexity – unwind

    onto the straight and narrow – a pier
    above the murky waters of the mind.
    The only way to go. Nothing queer.
    No thread of Ariadne to unwind.

    We wish for clear weather, warm and dry,
    but clear thinking quickly makes it clear
    as wind sweeps all the clouds from the sky
    the rainbows will also disappear.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • The march of evolution

    The grand evolutionary procession:
      striding elephants,
      lumbering rhinoceri,
      stalking lions,
      gliding giraffes…
    We walk tall next to them, leading our children, hand in hand.

    Most of the ones on display are better adapted than us,
      a lot are bigger,
      a lot are stronger,
      a lot are faster,
      a lot are more vicious,
    but none are as dangerous.

    What is it that separates us from the rest?
      Some of them use tools
      some of them have complex language,
      some of them sacrifice themselves for others
      some of them murder the members of their own tribe…
    Each specific characteristic is shared.

    But in no other species do all these traits combine
    to form our unique capacity
      for self-serving
      self-indulgent
      self-destroying
      self-delusion.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Conversation overheard at the train station

    There is another train, mummy!
    – Yes, there is. But it is not our train.
    – Why is it going, then?

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Morning

    Cicadas’ chirping is insanely loud,
    the sticky air – thick and full of fog
    and I can barely inhale this morning.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • The waters of eternal youth

    My well is deep and almost full of sadness,
    its waters dark, its syrupy contents
    attracting ants and flies and other creatures:
    some birds and mice that sunk under the surface,
    preserved in sugar – feathers, fur and bones,
    like little gods, demanding adoration.
    The lure so sweet: abandon hope,
    abandon disappointment, strife and effort,
    become an angel, paragon of virtue,
    of feathers so smooth, and white, and silky,
    forever undisturbed, forever perfect,
    forever still.
    Intoxicating poison
    of sugar, death and mystery fermented –
    the nectar of the gods,
    the well of legend
    containing waters of eternal youth.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in
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