Anastasya Shepherd

Amazon Red Bubble Society6

Tag: city

  • Berlin

    My mind is sloshing in an empty brain,
    Forgotten jokes rising to the surface.
    Unbidden tears rising in my eyes,
    Unbound, unconnected and unclear,
    There is no sadness – maybe loss and mourning
    But then for whom or what?
    I am confused.
    I wade through rain and waters of Berlin,
    My mind precedes the tower of Babel –
    It grasps the meaning, but discards the form.
    The language spoken is of no importance
    And does not register or muddy
    The waters – deep and murky as they are,
    With lurking Moray eels and tiny spiders
    Who build a home from the air bubbles,
    All light and sparkle, lightness and the beauty
    Supported by a web of finest silk,
    A bubble dance distorting space and vision,
    Concealing occupant, revealing truth…
    I wander through a half-imagined city
    Of memories and loss and expectations
    With long-forgotten, longed for sense of lightness.
    This, too, shall pass.
    It’s time to gather stones.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • 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

  • Urban tree

    Calligraphy of naked branches
    against the urban avalanches
    is crisp and clear, like the voices
    of morning birds. There are no choices.
    Breathe in the cold that stops your breath,
    that fills your lungs – your shibboleth
    and drown, happy, in the verse
    of crystal clear universe.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Almost, but not entirely, unlike fish.

    Underground is deep in places.
    Deep under.
    Buried in space and time.
    Connecting the romantic awe of the past,
    when the technology was new
    and the belief in its potential – unrestrained,
    with the pragmatic helplessness of the present,
    when we take a deep breath
    before plunging into the unknown.
    No longer an exciting miracle,
    mysterious yet knowable,
    but a complex system,
    poorly understood and therefore dangerous.

    You have to enter,
    to give yourself up to the incomprehensible,
    to the frightening and uncontrollable,
    on a daily basis.
    Just to get from A to B.
    That’s how we travel in the close,
    crowded space of the city.
    That’s how we travel in time,
    progressively more complicated.
    Taking a deep breath
    before plunging into a crowd
    like water.

    As you go under,
    you can no longer hear the rain.
    The water does not transmit sound,
    it exerts pressure.
    Comforting and stifling, it holds you tight.
    Deep under.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Further Reductions

    Urban spaces –
    they do their best to define us
    as we do our best to push through the visual noise,
    through the cultural pollution of busy streets,
    through life thrust at us easily and cheaply –
    consumed, discarded, unlived…

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • London Night

    Drown in the London night.
    In the dark you see the light,
    river beckons, cold and bright.
    Drown in the London night.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • The City and its Memories

    (part of the image is from the installation by Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Tate Britain)

    It is true that the best things in life are free… However, to enjoy them you need a lot of expensive things: food, shelter, medical care and a half-decent government to ensure that they are not stolen.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Cities

    Cities…
    boxes upon boxes,
    crowded with the world’s most dangerous predators,
    noisy,
    indifferent,
    dirty,
    piling up higher and higher,
    all the way to heaven.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • A monument to Yuri Gagarin in London – verse 1

    The city is made of shadows of history,
    from the heavy metal shadows of ideas,
    through the solid, slightly organic, old-stone shadows of creation,
    to the barely noticeable, evanescent shadows of lives unexamined and barely lived,
    momentarily dispersed by prevalent winds,
    lives of which the city itself is composed,
    its life blood,
    without which it is just a heap of stuff,
    a stone doll-house decorated by metal figurines…

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in
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