The Friday Poem on 25/02/22
We chose ‘The Control Room’ by Suzannah Evans as this week’s Friday Poem because we love the way the poem transports us off-world, but also anchors us firmly to our own planet. It explores the way we humans — even the most grounded and rational scientists among us — are hard-wired to anthropomorphise things. The little rover, with her plutonium heart and her lightweight elbow, reminds us of Pixar’s WALL-E, or something out of Wallace and Grommit. The scientists treat ‘her’ with touching care — she is part-protégée, part-dependent, part-adventurer — and we can’t help but join in and cheer her on. And perhaps the last few lines are a gentle nudge to question why we are searching for signs of life so far away, on another planet, rather than taking better care of our own.
The Control Room
every morning we are overjoyed
to find her plutonium heart still halving
it feels like she’s seen so much but then
haven’t we seen it all too
from our padded office chairs
the glinting data sucked in
through her instruments, through
the selfie camera borne aloft
on one lightweight elbow. Through her eye
we squint into the unfiltered sun.
Some days the bully wind
lifts goldbrown dirt to blast
her surfaces, score her paint. Any one of us
would be scorched to a stain on that ground
but she’s our girl, our correspondent
when she overcomes a crater’s edge
or bests a difficult rock
we punch the air and take big sips
of our coffee, shout
COME ON SWEETHEART
our eyes water when we learn
she has scaled another measurable height
each evening we rest her in a sheltered spot
lift our jackets off their hooks
wake up our cars in the parking lot
drive them back to our neighbourhoods
with their lawn sprinklers, hydrangeas
and lit windows, signs of life.
