Featured Writer Paresh Tiwari
Scorched
A crow tears at the carcass of a cow. Now dead three days.
The earth bakes ochre. Parts its lips.
Sun, a burning charcoal, slithers down the throat of wind.
His eyes are barren fields. A pale shade of despair. The sky that they search a cauldron of emptiness streaked with impotent clouds. Come tomorrow the farmer would weave these clouds into a rope. Sallow as his bones.
And hang from the dead tree by the dead well.
evening meal
the rice-pot fills up
with rain
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 O:JA&L’s featured writer for March 2020.
Image: Rain by Rajasekharan Parameswaran (1963- ). Oil on canvas. No size specified. No completion date specified. By free license.
