In Praise of Poetry, Planets, and the Energy of the Sea

a writing prompt from Ada Limón and NASA + how to join them in space

Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, take a look back through the archive for one that does. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

If you want to skip right to the prompt, without any preliminaries or wordy words from me, scroll on down to the heading: a writing prompt.

There is something of poetry that resembles the sea. The way words can be written, erased, rearranged, and spread out in a new pattern—it’s like the tide pushing water onto the sand, tumbling shells and sea creatures ashore, then sweeping the beach clean for the next wave.

Or something like that.

I made a D in my college Oceanography class—my first ever D—so I clearly didn’t absorb much information.¹ I do recall that ocean waves are less about water moving, and more about energy moving through water. Surface waves, storm surges, tsunamis—all are formed through different ways and waves of energy moving.

I guess what I mean to point out is how new poems are always being written, as surely as ocean waves keep rolling in. As constant as the tide, new collections of words and images and meaning are always possible as energy moves through them.

Like this brand new poem from Ada Limón, the U.S. Poet Laureate now serving her second term.² She wrote it for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission that will set out towards Jupiter next year. The Clipper will eventually circle around Jupiter’s icy moon Europa in a scientific search for habitable conditions and ocean water under the ice, and the poem will travel too—etched onto a panel of the spacecraft.

The poem is printed below with this week’s writing prompt, but watch it first in this animated video, with the poet narrating.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Send Your Name into Space

NASA is inviting you to send your own name into space along with Limón’s poem, through the “Message in a Bottle” project.

NASA’s Message in a Bottle campaign invites people around the world to sign their names to a poem written by the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored. The campaign is a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Library of Congress.

The poem is engraved on NASA’s robotic Europa Clipper spacecraft, along with participants' names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system. Europa Clipper is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in October 2024, and by 2030, it will be in orbit around Jupiter. Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.³

You can add your name here: Sign Your Name and then you get a groovy certificate like this one.

NASA says this about the project, linking poetry and space:

Asking big questions is a part of the human experience. This opportunity celebrates the similarities between art and science. Both poetry and planetary science ask big questions about the universe, and our place within it.

There are more projects out there that link art and science—poetry and planets. Read more about the Lunar Codex—a pet project of one writer that has since expanded to include the creative work of “over 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, from 157 countries, in 4 time capsules launched to the moon.” I first read about it this week in the New York Times article A Time Capsule of Human Creativity, Stored in the Sky (gift link) and it’s what sent me skipping down the internet pathway to discover Limón’s poem In Praise of Mystery.

a writing prompt

Find a line or two in Limón’s poem below and use it as a starting image for your own writing.

I’m starting with: “We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.”

Where will you start, and where will the energy of your writing waves take you today?

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

—by Ada Limón, from The Library of Congress

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Let me know what you think about the prompt, or come back and add some of what you write in the comments. Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

1. My mistake was taking Oceanography my first semester as a freshman, and sitting with my older sister and her friend, who talked to me during class when I should have been taking notes. Or possibly it was camping overnight in my car for Bruce Springsteen tickets the night before the exam….

2. Find more poetry and inspiration from her in my posts Paying Attention with Ada Limón and On Not Giving Up and Carrying Grief.

3. Lots to explore on NASA’s Europa website. Watch the spacecraft be assembled, and learn more here: https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/learn/