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Unyielding,
riding days through blizzard,
squinting, eyes frozen,
teeth rattling six months in a cottage buried under snow,
yet her hair was restless, longed for a more exotic wind.
So her comb fell across Japan, China, Vietnam,
Korea, Singapore...
She sketched and wrote it all down,
all the seven hundred seventy-seven
histories of each snowflake, and every date.
Royal Geographical Society’s first woman fellow,
alone in every curiosity,
no warm shower of courtship
kept her kitchen-bound;
rather than candles and tablecloths
she spread out maps, photos, natural history books.
Settling only briefly in her best sister’s backyard garden,
her heart craved only a diamond,
for one single deep human relationship.
She married only after her sister fell to typhus,
but Dr Bishop soon died as well –
her husband, beautiful, ephemeral as a mayfly.
It was as if the living were supposed
to all clear from the path of that
Bird's eye, into a new wasteland