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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.

Suzannah Evans lives in Sheffield. Her debut poetry collection Near Future was published by Nine Arches Press in 2018.

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