Premium Essay

Life on Mars

In: English and Literature

Submitted By gigglemister
Words 840
Pages 4
World of Science
Science can be found all around you, everything you look at contains some aspect of science within it. Tracy K. Smith uses her poems to draw our attention towards the science used in everyday life. Throughout her book of poems Life on Mars she uses mystical beings or characters to help portray the science around us.
Smith starts off the book with a poem called “Sci-Fi” (pg7); having science plainly in the name of the poem she gets the point across that the poem does involve science. With science already in the mind of the reader Smith is able to make any connection she wants in science and literature. This poems focus is on history and the future;
“History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like that dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex

Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.” where Smith captures the reader’s attention with talking about how dinosaurs once ruled the earth but were wiped extinct by the ice age, and the fact that global warming has taken spotlight in today’s news saying that we will need to come up with a elucidation or we, like the dinosaurs, will become extinct as well. In the poem Smith shares the idea in which scientists have been trying to figure out for years now, finding a livable planet for Earth to inhabit once living conditions become too harsh for life on the planet. Smith goes even a step further saying that when we have the technology to make it to another livable planet that we will have the technology to cure all illness and diseases, which would make the reader even more excited and anxious for that time to come. With focusing mainly on the future with her “Sci-Fi” poem she then takes a turn to the history side of things with her

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