“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