Key Points
WASHINGTON, June 1 (Reuters) - 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...
she recalled thinking just after receiving the invitation in a call at the Library of Congress, where the 47-year-old poet is serving a two-year second term as the nation's top bard...
On Thursday night, exactly one year later in a ceremony at the library, 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 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...
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...
