Poet laureate Ada Limón dedicated her award to women artists across the world. She read the poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which will be engraved on NASA’s spacecraft that will travel to the second moon of Jupiter, and she called it an “offering” to the “wounded world.”
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00:00 Tonight I want to share with you the poem that I wrote that will be engraved
00:06 on NASA's spacecraft, the Europa Clipper, in my own handwriting that will travel
00:16 1.8 billion miles to the second moon of Jupiter. It is a poem about what connects
00:24 us to one another. In praise of mystery, arching under the night sky, inky with
00:35 black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know. We pin quick wishes on
00:43 stars. From Earth we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe,
00:51 expert and evident. Still there are mysteries below our sky. The whale song,
01:00 the songbirds singing its call in the bow of a wind-shaken tree. We are
01:07 creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and
01:16 pleasure, sun and shadow. And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold
01:25 distance of space, but the offering of water. Each drop of rain, each rivulet,
01:33 each pulse, each vein. Oh, second moon, we too are made of water, of vast and
01:42 beckoning seas. We too are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of
01:50 small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark. Thank you.