Robert Epstein

Haiku Days of Remembrance Robert Epstein

Haiku has the power to heal great loss, because it reveals to one's heart the midnight truth about life-and-death, which our everyday consciousness relegates to the margins. In the poems here that honor my father's life, the gap appearing between life and death is diminished. My father lives on in these haiku, which were mainly (but not exclusively) written in remembrance on his death day: the second Sunday in June over the past sixteen years. My father is your father is every father. Walk with me in haiku remembrance of my Dad through which the unbreakable bonds of love point us all back in the direction of wholeness. As novelist Thornton Wilder observed: "The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude."