LOOKING BEYOND

The day after the election was my birthday, but I was in no mood to celebrate.

I couldn’t summon the joy, the lightness. I was weighted by the thought of the years ahead, years that I was afraid would feel like a long, dark road. Yet even then, I knew what would hold me fast: the unshakeable closeness of my family, the steady kindness of my friends, like boulders I could lean on; the quiet consistency of the ocean; the waning and waxing of the moon and withering and blooming of flowers will continue. Season after season.

I reread the poem by Ada Limón—her message from Earth to Europa, that distant, watery moon of Jupiter, a piece of us cast into the cosmos. A reminder, maybe, to seek what is constant, what refuses to be dimmed, even when the sky goes dark.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

By Ada Limón

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.

歌颂神秘：致诗欧罗巴

艾达·蕾梦

在墨水般的夜空穹庐脚下

向着无尽的黑暗，我们指出

那几个我们知道的行星，我们

给星星送上简短的祝福。身居地球，

我们阅读天空，就好像它是一本无误的书

传教宇宙, 一目了然。

尽管，我们的天空下仍然充满谜团：

鲸鱼之歌，鸣鸟之曲

风摇树吟。

我们终究是充满敬畏的生物，充满好奇:

美, 叶子与花朵，

悲伤与快乐，阳光与阴影。

我们共有的不是黑暗，

不是太空的冷酷与遥远，而是

水的恩赐，每一滴雨，

每条溪流，每条脉道,每条脉搏。

噢，欧罗巴,木星之月，我们也是水之灵

在广阔,宜人的海洋间栖息。

造就我们的也是伟大奇妙的事物:

无数普通，似乎微不足道的爱，

和黑暗抑制不住呼声。

“In Praise of Mystery” by Ada Limón was released at the Library of Congress on June 1, 2023, in celebration of the poem’s engraving on NASA’s Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch in October of 2024. (Translated to Chinese by Minghua Nie)