#4 summer shards

Recently the poet laureate Ada Limon was requested by NASA to write a poem to be etched on the outside of a spacecraft named Europa Clipper, partly named after one of Jupiter’s moons to which it will travel on an almost two billion mile journey. The poem and spacecraft will not reach its destination until 2030, six years after its launch. I often think that potters have to see into the future. We have to imagine how our pots will shrink and transform in the heat and accept the surface changes and color shifts– but the idea of peering six years into the future is a whole other realm.

There are pots I inscribe with poems, often poems my mother wrote twenty-plus years ago. These poems are usually printed and appear backwards in my loopy handwriting. Or sometimes I inscribe directly on the surface with a loose touch. I want my words to be abstracted. I expect the observer/user knows there is hidden meaning. I hope the illegibility adds to the wonder as if small invisible words on a moon shaped vase call out into the dark. I read that Ada Limon practiced writing her poem by hand nineteen times until she got it right so that NASA could transcribe her actual handwriting onto the vessel. I still wonder how it will be transformed as it moves through the atmosphere, through the heat , cold, and time of space travel. Perhaps only a slight poetic variation from the heat, space and time of a kiln.

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.

--Ada Limon, In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa, requested by NASA; to be engraved on the side of the Europa Clipper on its mission to Jupiter