‘Turning Saints into the Sea’ is featured alongside two more poems by Taz in Issue 14 of The Lonely Crowd, which may be pre-ordered here.

 

Turning Saints into the Sea

 

Stubborn pink scales a cliff-face becoming heather,

the sea crests hours instructing gulls to remember

nothing, footsteps totter in throat knots like a past

 

actuating days deigning the corners of each thirst,

meaningful as the sum of parts. Foxgloves stare

at distant elders wanting to grow tall, clumps of clay

 

grieve particle separation in tattered pots, spoon

voices pretending that words whispered here could

be heard in the furthest west of land where the fit

 

for communion jam a deceased willow, bodies

aureate song shaping ampersands. Dead-wood

feels no urge to chase the day after, a rotting boat

 

bobs twice a day for brief spells to sky-gaze inches

higher contemplating what penetrates its shell peeling

a shore to illicit touch, an axis fit for a crushed pigeon

 

who sacrificed himself in flight to remember a June

ending under a city ash for flesh to go their own way.

 

Taz Rahman is a Cardiff based poet, writer and literary content creator. He has been published in Poetry Wales, Bad Lilies, South Bank Poetry, Anthropocene, Honest Ulsterman,Nation Cymru,Culture Mattersand various anthologies. He has been selected to be the Chairperson of Poetry Wales Magazine’s Readers’ Committee from September 2022 and is editor of the climate emergency themed literary journal Modron alongside poets Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans. He was one of the judges for the 2021 Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. In 2021 he was awarded a place in the Literature Wales writer development programme Representing Wales, and was mentored by Zoë Brigley. He founded the Youtube poetry channel ‘Just Another Poet’ in 2019, which is presently supported by the Books Council Wales and had previously received literary commissions from Literature Wales. His debut collection, East of the Sun, West of the Moon is forthcoming from Seren on February 26th, 2024.