Days progress. Yesterday, March took the baton from February’s withered hand. Nevertheless, this raging winter blusters again: a forecast of more snow on Tuesday in New York’s backyard. Additionally, today is my mother’s birthday; she passed nearly ten years ago, after Mother’s Day in 2016. & this month is named for Mars, that bloodthirsty Roman God of war and eponymous red planet. All of these motifs together inspire an allusion to the Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars,” the Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 2012.

Frank Tassone, here, your host for this week’s Haibun Monday, where we blend haiku with prose in the form Basho made famous. Today, let’s delve into a Puliter-prize winner’s classic, and resonate its verse with our own. Let’s write our own tribute to the theme of Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars.”

Her 2011 book of poems served as an extended elegy for her late father, according to the New Yorkers’ Dan Chiasson. Floyd William Smith (1935-2008) was “one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope,” according to the New York Times’ Dana Jennings. There are two excerpts from two poems in the collection that resonate with me as specific to mourning a parent:

One is from the last five stanzas of “The speed of Belief,” Smith’s poem in memoriam to her Father:

You stepped out of the body.

Unzipped it like a coat,

And will it drag you back

As flesh, voice, scent?

What heat burns without touch,

And what does it become?

What are they that move

Through these rooms without even

The encumbrance of shadows?

If you are one of them, I praise

The God of all gods, who is

Nothing and nowhere, a law,

Immutable proof. And if you are bound

By habit or will to be one of us

Again, I pray you are what waits

To break back into the world

Through me.

Tracy K. Smith, “Life on Mars” Graywolf Press, 2011, p. 33

Smith addresses her father, now departed. She yearns for his presence again, realizing that the last avenue for this is through her own life: through being herself, his daughter.

The next, from the first stanza of part one of the Collection’s Eponymous poem, relays the sense and strength of the mysterious force binding us all together, an existential centrifuge stronger than love:

Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people

When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think

That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something

That knows better won’t let you drift apart so easily, and how

Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in space.

Tracy K. Smith, “Life on Mars” Graywolf Press, 2011, p. 37

Here, Smith recognizes how bonds between people can hold them in orbit around themselves, even beyond the strength of love itself.

I resonate with these especially today, on Mom’s birthday.

Ours was a complicated relationship, to say the least. I love her, and yet she drove me crazy! Her personal struggles with my father led her to burden me with them uncomfortably. These struggles drove her to the kind of Jekyll/Hyde life friends of Lois recognize all too well. Despite this, she was there for me in moments that counted. & I still orbit her absence. Does she manifest through me? If so, I hope it’s in a far more positive way!

Hopefully, these excerpts from Smith’s “Life on Mars” resonate with you in some way. In whatever way they do, compose a haibun that reflects that resonance, as a tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s work.

New to haibun? The form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated.

New to dVerse? Here is what you do:

• Write a haibun that alludes to the themes of the excerpts from Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars.”
• Post it on your personal site/blog.
• Include a link back to dVerse in your post.
• Copy your link onto the Mr. Linky.
• Remember to click the small checkbox about data protection.
• Read and comment on some of your fellow poets’ work.
• Like and leave a comment below if you choose to do so.
• Have fun!