Life on Mars

The Speed of Belief
When we believed in the underworld, we buried fortunes for our dead.
Low country of dogs and servants, where ghosts in gold-stitched robes walk

Old loves turn up in dreams, still ived at every slight. Show them out.
The bed is full. Our limbs tangle in sleep, but our shadows walk.

Perhaps one day it will be enough to live a few seasons ad return to ash.
No children to carry our names. No grief. Life will be a brief, hollow walk.

My father won't lie still, though his legs are buried in trousers and socks.
But where does all he knew -and all he must now know- walk?
(Smith, Tracy K., 29)

Smith's work had a balance of hapiness and sadness that really resonated with me. When reading her poems I felt a common theme in many with the inevitability of death and how we percieve death. I  especially got emotional with the poems about her father and his struggle during his last years. Death being unavoidable and maybe that is where the theme of space comes in. When I think of space and how vast and unknown it is to us, I feel so tiny and insignificant in comparison. It reminds me that our lives are just a tiny blip in the grand scheme of space and time. We are all only human who love and know what it means to lose something or someone at some point in time and that is what ties us all together on Earth in our short time while being on it. That is why this quote resonated with me, it reminded me of all the experiences we live through and everything we learn along the way, but with death there is memory in life.