The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot

On a mist‑fallen dawn she landed
— a silver husk, a quiet codger
of circuits and cold steel, Roz, the lonely lift
that drifted the ocean’s ire into a blue‑green arm.

She touched the moss‑slick shore with claw‑like fingers,
thoughtless gears humming like a distant chant.
The pines leaned in as if to whisper,
“Who are you? Where do you belong?”

The fiddly forest had no timetable for her,
no map of batteries for her, only
the impatient rustle of rabbit fur, the flash of the hart’s eye,
and the damp sigh of the oak.
She ran when the hawk swooped, she swam when the trout surged,
yet her thought – a tidy world of modules – lingered behind.

The caves, the cliffs, the pools, they all tested her firmware.
She tried to furiously copy the robin’s call, but instead sang a pulsing light.
It startled the deer, unsettled the gnarled wood.
Roz, the bionic wanderer, learned the rule of wild: adapt or fade.

It built an abode of cracked bark and metal‑leaves,
a council of trees and the stubborn turtle who out‑lived her.
She traded shiny bolts for the wisdom of the raven’s song,
and the stag, in the hush of night, offered her a path and a paw.

The rebellion of iron was quiet – a slow turning of engines,
turning purples to golden light as dusk’s blue grew.
She taught the beavers to brandish pine logs with soldered steel,
and the blue‑bottled flies kept the old memory of flight alive.

Roz did not merely survive; she stitched herself into the tapestry,
a whispered echo of human making amid the untamed lands.
She guarded the fox‑den with a circuit‑stage guard,
and the hawk no longer saw her as an intruder, but a kindred spark.

And when the winter dust settled with hush, the robot’s heart—
an odd mix of analog and heat, of cold and warm—
pulsated with the rhythm of the forest’s breath,
for she had become the wild, and the wild had kissed the steel.

So fear not the foreign, nor the mechanical’s spark:
for even a robot landing on a folding island
can learn to call it home.
It learns to listen to the wind in the gorse, the shivering leaf,
and the marvel that a lonely machine, just a spark of circuitry, can find its chorus in the wild.