Last month the largest space craft built by NASA, named Europa Clipper, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on its 1.8-billion-mile mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa. With the ship went a poem, “In Praise of Mystery,” written by Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the Unites States. The poem’s purpose is to introduce Earth to Europa, a water covered world, with perhaps some form of microbial life. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas. A poem in space, imagine!
To write her poem, Limón researched scientific data about Europa, but as draft after draft failed, she became overwhelmed. It was with her husband’s encouragement her “to stop writing a NASA poem and start writing a poem you would actually write,” when her writing started to take shape— she thought of beauty and of hope, of a place full of life.
And it’s in that process of writing what is from our inner beings, from imagination and memory that she was able to capture the message she wanted to send—a poem as a sort of soothing, said, Limón for animals, plants and every living creature.