In my opinion, it's OK, but not her best work. Which I suppose is inevitable, since she's writing it on spec rather than from her heart. Compare it to "Sharks in the Rivers", which I like better:

https://poets.org/poem/sharks-rivers

Calling out "the whale song, the songbird singing" feels facile to me. These are easy, accessible "mysteries", cliches.

But of course she's been asked for something generic about how great it is to explore stuff, so you're gonna get cliches. Her concluding stanza does it better: "We, too, are made of wonders, of great/and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,/of a need to call out through the dark." Again, it's mostly stuff we've heard a thousand times before, but it's got a bit more panache. "Call out through the dark" is more viscerally relevant to the mission, and emotionally engaging.

I also like her references to water. I dunno if that was just what was handed to her as part of the spec, but it's concretely about this specific mission. "O second moon, we, too, are made/of water, of vast and beckoning seas." That's the best line in the poem, the one that really says why we're doing what we're doing. (I wouldn't have used "second moon", at least not without some kind of payoff about the evocative word "second", but maybe it'll feel stronger if I sit with it for a bit.)

It's stronger read aloud than silently. Though to my mind, since this is conspicuously an inscription, I'd have wanted to rely on that less.

These are, of course, just my opinions, which are worth the paper they're written on.

I also found it pretty lacking in emotion (although it seems that was what they were going for) and prolix.

> [jfengel] I am. (Or at least, adjacent to one, a Shakespeare scholar.)

I love this about HN. It gave me "Are you John Nagle, or was that a quote?" classic vibes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947