Featured Writer Paresh Tiwari
Losing the River to a Lake
I made a sketch of you on the last page of my diary. It is a pen and ink scribble. Some would say it never really captured your spirit, and now it’s weeping into the pages, blotting away on the edges. Budding into tiny birds that will fly away come morning. The birds are free. They spread over the sky. One wing at a time. Blanketing the cobalt with your scent. Soon the pages would have all been inked in your likeness.
By tomorrow, Sangestar Tso would materialise within the tremor of my hands. Tattooed over my bones in a web of hroseng. There are dead trees beneath the surface of what was once a river. And it’s shrinking by the hour.
passing through
only the stars fall
thick and heavy
About the author:
Paresh Tiwari is a writer, poet, and a cartoonist in the body of a Naval Officer. He has been widely published, especially in the sub-genre of Japanese poetry. The first collection of his haiku and haibun, An Inch of Sky, was published in 2014. Currently the resident cartoonist for Cattails, a journal by United Haiku and Tanka Society, USA, he was also commissioned for thirty-five illustrations for the December 16 edition of Frameless Sky. Tiwari has been invited to read his works at various literature festivals, including the Goa Art and Lit Fest – 2016, and has conducted haiku and haibun workshops at Hyderabad International Literature Festival – 2014, SIES College Mumbai and British Council Library, Mumbai. His second book of haibun, titled Raindrops Chasing Raindrops is in the bookstores now. Tiwari is the O:JA&L featured writer for March 2020.
Image: Lotus by Rajasekharan Parameswaran (1963- ). Oil on canvas. 72 x 48 inches. No completion date specified. By free license.
