Anastasya Shepherd

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Tag: poetry

  • Sleeping Beauty

    With gratitude to a friend and a poet, Yana Kane, who asked this question – and inspired so many others.

    White monolithic marble
    slowly flows into
    blue, where curling spires,
    gradually exhausted,
    fade into sky and vanish.
    Tracing intricate movement,
    my gaze, under its enchantment,
    takes me away and out
    where there is no sound,
    colour or time – just spaces
    still but containing movement.
    Somewhere in these spires
    there’s an enchanted princess
    sleeping a hundred years
    and one.

    And then?
    [question from the audience]

    What happens
    In year one hundred and two?

    And then…

    When a miracle happens it gives you a choice –
    it defies the prediction’s imperious voice.

    If the prince failed to show and give you a kiss
    you can give happy ending a miss.

    You can stay in your own unchanged universe
    and ignore the fairy’s presumptuous curse.

    You can stick middle finger to human endeavour –
    Sleeping Beauty, enchanted forever.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Snide comment

    Oh, if the world made sense!
    Unfortunately, my wishes
    in the survival race
    go, sleep with the fishes.
    Our present form
    is but a crude romance
    of survivable norm
    and insensible chance.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Tsuren’s Sonnet

    Like wilted leaf it falls upon my soul –
    this day that wearied me before its start:
    interminably slow as a whole,
    unmemorably fast in every part…

    This day is full of empty conversations,
    of actions I repeat without thought,
    of petty, unimportant irritations
    that cause no pain, of deeds that come to nought.

    But in the evening burning leaves begin
    to raise the flames to empty skies, like prayers.
    I smell the acrid smoke through my skin
    with clarity and sharpness of nightmares.
    Contorted, twisted, dry, as black as coal,
    the burning autumn leaves subsume my soul.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Fire

    Smoke slithers along the embers,
    fire dances and undulating
    lines are feminine, rhythmic, slow,
    soft and sinuous, mesmerising…
    Slow time feels sticky, like syrup.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • On the Nature of Poetry

    Trying to describe the indescribable
    is a mug’s game.

    There are no stories
    beyond the power of words,
    for stories are words.

    As we try to get at the magic of experience,
    the enchantment that can transcend facts
    and transmute reality,
    …it turns into a story
    born of words
    and limited by them.
    It rhymes and writhes,
    but artifice of language
    only hints
    at possibility
    of something deeper;
    it makes your reader work,
    inventing meaning,
    while losing your experience forever
    and making you redundant…
    What a pity!

    Poor poet –
    forever betrayed by your tools
    turning experience into stories,
    visceral into abstract,
    dreams into – what?

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Some thoughts on self-improvement

    Dedicated, with gratitude, to Yana Kane, who inspired this poem

    You set off on a difficult journey –
    the journey of self-improvement.
    You read books and attend lectures.
    You meditate and practice.
    You work on your self,
    but it stubbornly refuses to improve.
    It remains self-same,
    immutable safe-same,
    for if it changed –
    how would you feel yourself?
    With no you and no self –
    tricky!

    … but you do,
    of course you do,
    moment by moment,
    experience by experience,
    creation by creation,
    with or without a journey,
    you fashion your self
    out of current patterns
    and imagine that it was
    and that it will be.

    You cannot improve
    on something that never existed,
    but you can always change a story
    you just made up.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Night

    The chilly air tastes a little bitter,
    spiced by the silver light of crescent moon
    and blinking stars continually titter
    this endless night in June.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • Solitude

    Without answer smiles become pathetic,
    they lose all meaning, fade into a grimace.
    The sound of a broken dripping faucet
    co-mingles with the rain and disappears.
    Like clammy shivers of persistent fever
    it permeates my body and takes over –
    my solitude.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in

  • For Yana

    Have a sip of home brew.
    Tell me all about you:
    what you feel and what you think,
    would you like another drink?
    Give a cheer, shed a tear
    – we survived another year.
    Tell me of your loves and hates,
    what is past and what awaits.
    Dream in light of winter moon
    shining into this cocoon.
    We can hide from wind and storm
    here – cosy, snug and warm.

    —

    by

    ashepherd
    in
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