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Taz Rahman – Two Poems

What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. - E. M. Forster


Lake-breeze pokes sunlit errors. bees clump

repeating the same note in rose-pink

spiraea, leaves


ovate a winding path unworthy of the body,

Furzton flats and sharps inside

a coated


wooden hammer to dismantle the gone.

The sun is too bright, I can’t

differentiate between


the weight of sin in blossom and guava jam

two decades old sticking to the base

of a jar past its maker,


this empire stretches gaab, daab, amra, sours

the formation of phlox, footsteps

thrum unknown keys,


open no doors, chainsaws cut distant vines

on roads before the age

of cycle-paths,


mechanised mowers grit teeth for mornings

to sleep still at half past ten,

green malingers


in the linden and the lime, Dravidic tongues

inflect Kerala, shatter invisible

coconuts into tales


circulating Lidl and the Woodville, tales

of how this skin is blotchy,

has taken on memory,


wrists wrinkled, corners of nails gawking

ponytails in flicks and frets.

Gravel loops


in Egyptian terry shy of the sea sleeping

in heraldic strokes two miles

off, tender kahins


summon tufts of light too far to inherit,

the wind chimes secrets in reeds

sifting green


no right to be this soft with no past, a canal

winds to distemper alders,

clouds scatter


devious pores to deflower the distance between

two points on a map a month

short of 28 years


straight as the heron's dart, duckweed docks

Novello and Dahl in loins let lost,

at Cadwaladers'


almonds deconstruct ridges of cream for ice

to crackle, the ceiling moves

front to back,


skin mulls memory in foam for dawns to reconcile

form on mattress. Flesh immures ketones

for the fridge-grown


fungus to puff air so lowly junipers yet to bear

the weight of sin may breathe

fresh, quake


aspens in the lightest breeze in tombed esplanades

of the darkest limbs, ash sleeves

for the story ended.

Anda

Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound. - “The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky 


Bolt all doors, latch windows, let steam

fester. Daal lingers long past the plates


scraped. The other night I cracked halua:

grate your carrots thin, shear in index-skin,


watch a sunset grind yellow into orange,

bleed. Smoke gathers a room away burning


logos, clarifying butter - churn baby churn,

ghee another year, a glass tomb to sensate


a crane's yearning for coronal fire. Why,

to preserve what? Rosewater clears


the palette, what rises falls, evenings circle,

groan, cling to Cathays, woodpigeons


articulate their thirst for gravel. Winter

broke me like a speckled thrush on its


tangled pine for almanacs. I predict drizzle

startling the corners of windowsill moss,


starlight and moonlight and amorous

melodies thickening bounteous spores


to reassert green. This morning, my

sister lit her Belling, I had not smelt


sugar suppurating anda in three

decades inside a house, her home:


Scrat and Thumper sneak in under

the fence yet to gauge what business


the wagtail has with perished leaves,

I dream all day of being an ill-fitting


cardigan, slouch forget-me-nots among

sleet. Inward fog flutters in the distance


confusing nomenclature, remains

itself. The self. I am west. My abode


is a Welsh fridge. The top-shelf

caresses the frosted element slowing


death, halting birth, the last little

tupperware my mother filled two


years before she dies and I save

the last dollop, mould-clad like her


disintegrating body, soft tissue aching

communion, skeletal, drifting prayer.


--


Note:


In Bengali ‘anda’ is the word for egg. The shape of the number zero, ‘shunno’ in Bengali, resembles the shape of an egg. Shunno as the literary term also refers to nothingness, absence or vacancy, and therefore in common use ‘anda’ means nothing or nothingness.  

Taz Rahman is a Cardiff based poet of Bengali heritage. His first collection is forthcoming in February 2024 from Seren Books. He is a 2023 Hay Festival 'Writers at Work' alumni, was shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and was in the 2021 Literature Wales annual writer development scheme for which he was mentored by the Poetry Wales editor Zoe Brigley. He has been published in Poetry Wales, Interpreter's House, Bad Lilies, Propel, Anthropocene, Atrium and in numerous other UK magazines. He is on X, formerly Twitter as @amonochromdream

Photograph: Whispers in the mist by Arunava Bal

Arunava Bal resides in the town Birati, in Kolkata, India. He is a cardiac non-invasive technologist by profession and education, and a nature lover and art lover in the core of his heart. Besides traversing the mundane, he loves daydreaming and getting lost in the happiness of the little things in life. His works have previously appeared in Chestnut Review, The Hooghly Review and Jaden Magazine.

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