Taz Rahman

The Free State of Roath

If you were on my mind
night and day, if I forgot to eat,
sleep, pray, 

on its palsied wings
a cormorant disrobed our past
spanning a whole 

Taff coralled in versions
of an upstream self, droplets
tremored rocks 

on no motive
to engender splash, blame
it on a daisy. The very 

thought of you
is thirst, my words weave
a city far off caves, 

canaries measure
wild uneven with theodolites,
some days 

I force a chord
playing an arpeggio filling
an entire freckle, 

warm coves
the insides of an arum,
the largest pure white 

spathes an enclosure
fingering the spikes to lily
leaves. My tongue 

is seasoned
in spooning arrows for Eucharist,
I floret days 

without voices
to shrill my walks, I think
your top lip is 

a delirious roller
passing up a storm, incubating
needs, a primer 

on primal
surging lockdowns, shrubbing
f-sharp tugged to sweeten 

the wettest patches
serving no purpose but widen
nights, leave marks 

on a kingfisher warming
another bank on another walk.
His was a body sulling 

snapdragons, deadheading
an ox-eye, a hatless lemon
in the evening blur.

Taz Rahman’s first collection East of the Sun, West of the Moon is forthcoming in February 2024 from Seren Books. He is part of the 2023 Hay Festival Writers at Work development scheme and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. He is an editor of the climate emergency journal Modron, serves as the reader’s committee chair for Poetry Wales magazine and founded Wales’ first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet to increase visibility of Welsh poets.

Taz wrote the following about ‘The Free State of Roath’:

This poem is for the reader to interpret as they wish. As a matter of limited guidance, all the poems in my forthcoming first poetry collection East of the Sun, West of the Moon from Seren Books (February 2024) explore the limits of a language made out of the behavioural traits of the flora and fauna encountered during solo or accompanied walks along Cardiff, to hint at what is let gone or the unattainable.