I was inspired to write this by Apollo-Soyuz—the first international space mission, jointly carried out the USA and USSR. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz
That year—it feels like several centuries ago—I was a graduate student in English at Johns Hopkins, just starting research on my dissertation. (The poem’s last line is not by me, but a borrowing from someone else, who had lived several centuries earlier.)
I wonder how it reads today…/
