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.
"Where do you start a poem like that?" 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.
Now being assembled at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, the spacecraft - larger than any other flown by NASA on an interplanetary mission - should reach Jovian orbit in 2030 after a 1.6 billion-mile journey. 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."
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. At the Library of Congress on Thursday night, Limon said she considers the Europa commission "the greatest honor and privilege of my life."
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