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153

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