US poet laureate writes ode to Europa for NASA’s mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.

U.S. Poet Laureate Writes Poem for NASA Spacecraft

By Colette Luke and Steve Gorman

“Where do you start a poem like that?”

When U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon was asked to write a poem for inscription on a NASA spacecraft headed to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, she felt a rush of excitement at the honor, followed by bewilderment at the seeming enormity of the task.

On Thursday night, exactly one year later in a ceremony at the Library of Congress, across the street from the U.S. Capitol, Limon’s 21-line creation, “In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa,” was unveiled and read aloud to a public audience for the first time, receiving a standing ovation.

The entire poem, a poet laureate writes ode to Europa for NASA’s mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.”>free-verse ode consisting of seven three-line stanzas, or tercets, will be engraved in Limon’s handwriting on the exterior of the Europa Clipper, due for launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October 2024.

Uniting Two Water Worlds

Limon’s “Poem for Europa” is less a meditation on science – though its first line seems to allude to a rocket launch – as it is an ode to nature and the awe it can inspire in humankind.

• Except for its title, it does not mention Europa explicitly but refers to its place among Jupiter’s natural satellites, and to the commonality of water that it shares with Earth: “O second moon, we too are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas.”
• It concludes: “We, too are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds / of a need to call out through the dark.”

“I wanted to point back to the Earth, and I think the biggest part of the poem is that it unites those two things,” she told Reuters in an interview in the Library of Congress poetry room hours before the piece was unveiled. “It unites both space and this incredible planet that we live on.”

Limon, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry collection “The Carrying,” recounted great difficulty when she first tried composing the Europa poem at a writers retreat in Hawaii.

Her breakthrough came on a suggestion from her husband, who Limon said encouraged her to “stop writing a NASA poem” and to create “a poem that you would write” instead. “That changed everything,” she remembered.

The only firm parameters NASA gave her were to relate something about the mission, to make it understandable to readers as young as 9, and to write no more than 200 words.

At the Library of Congress on Thursday night, Limon said she considers the Europa commission “the greatest honor and privilege of my life.”

Reflecting earlier on what the assignment meant, Limon said she wonders at “all of the human eyes and human ears and human hearts that will receive this poem and … it’s the audience that really overwhelms me.”

A writer of Mexican ancestry, Limon became the first Latina U.S. poet laureate and the 24th individual to hold the title when she was first appointed in September 2022.