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Geoffrey Philp

Between Babylon 
and the sea, I’ve built a home 
with the sea’s whispers. 

Copyright © 2024 by Geoffrey Philp. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Geoffrey Philp
Courtesy of Geoffrey Philp
Geoffrey Philp is a Jamaican American poet and the author of Archipelagos (Peepal Tree Press, 2023).
About Geoffrey Philp
Themes
Audio
Existential
Home
Identity
Oceans
About this Poem

“Before my morning walk, I usually begin my day by reading a haiku by Matsuo Bashō, Kobayashi Issa, or Fukuda Chiyo-ni. In the morning when I wrote this haiku, I’d read Bashō’s ‘death poem.’ As I stood atop the mound in Greynolds Park in North Miami Beach, I began to think about writing my own death poem to capture the contradictions of my identity and to pay homage to the practice that has shaped my life and work.”
—Geoffrey Philp

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