Do you sometimes wonder what happens after the gravediggers return to their workstations and the grieving relatives go home? What is it of the self or soul that’s left inside the box or urn, or floating in the air?  Do you think there may be life after death, a life after this life, an afterlife? Do you fret over reincarnation, heaven, or hell? Poets do.

resting in peace
her mobile phone
keeps ringing

Robert Epstein, a licensed psychologist, and haiku poet, has just edited Beyond The Grave: Contemporary Afterlife Haiku (Middle Island Press, 2015), an anthology of poets’ haiku on the life beyond. Thoughtful, sensitive, measured and moving, as well as studded with moments of humour, and brilliance, the anthology proves an invaluable companion for thinking about the limits (and beyond) of existence.

lilies the meaning of life after death

Leafing through poems on life after death, I let myself be led along lines of uncertainty, of hope, as well as humour, of the ineffable, of mysteries, without the certainties that dispose of thought.

afterlife
that turn of phrase
in her haiku
.
(Poems included in the anthology)