Ada Limon's 2024 TIME Women of the Year Toast

TIME

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.”

Transcript

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.

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