In Competition No. 2452 you were invited to write an elegy on the death, in Queensland, Australia, of a 176-year-old tortoise called Harriet, who had met Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and was for most of her life wrongly thought to be male.
D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Ogden Nash have all written lyrically about tortoises, so you were in good company. As for Harriet (whose parents were Testudo and Tartarus and whose favourite snacks were aubergine, courgette, beans and barley), a biologist tells me that it’s not as simple as you might think to tell the sex of a tortoise. Just try it! I realise now that my childhood tortoise Zebedee may well have been a Zuleika. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Ray Kelley, appropriately a Queenslander.
Harriet, gentle giant tortoise,
We honour you. Your century and three-quarters
Spanned Penny Post and World Wide Web.
You linked
Darwin to Dawkins. Doughtily unextinct,
You taught us much. Your testudineous pace
(200 yards an hour) sufficed to show
That sheer determination gains the place
To which one has a mind — not half a mind —
to go.
Unmarried,
You lived your years unhurried and unHarry’d.
You stuck your neck out when you had good
cause
Or pulled you head in; wisdom’s choice
was yours.
Swing low, sweet chariot:
It’s coming down to take you home now,
Harriet,
To the bosom of your Abraham. In his shell
Sleep well.
Ray Kelley
We watch our winters come and go,
We make our three score years and ten
And think how kindly Fate has been
To make the drip of sands so slow.
But seventeen decades crawled by
And Harriet still roamed the hills;
What need had she of doctors’ pills
When lust for living kept her spry?
Now she is dead, this living friend
Of men who moved in Darwin’s day,
As though a god had passed away
Whose life we thought should never end.
Our twisted world of wars and guns
Had never scratched her carapace;
Now she has gone; her empty place
Will not be filled by human sons.
Frank Mc Donald
O Harriet Testudo, long-misnomered Harry,
At one-hundred-and-seventy-six, gone! Could
you no longer tarry?
You befriended Darwin the bearded anthropologist
And of the two you are surely the more
sorely missed.
You must really have been a dazzler in your prime,
With strings of shell-suitors a-wooing you
all the time!
Think how often you were plenteously pregnant
When our glorious Victoria Regina was
reigning regnant.
It’s overwhelming to entertain the notion
That your progeny roamed that wild island
home in the ocean,
The Galapagos, off Ecuador in the Pacific,
Where you were born and raised, which is
something quite terrific.
A myriad tortoise tales you could doubtless
confide,
But sadly they will not be heard because you died.
Mike Morrison
We seldom see or touch the inspiration
That helped the world’s great thinkers on the path
To comprehend the wonders of creation
Like Mendel’s peas or Archimedes’ bath.
And now, too late, we hear an ancient tortoise
Has died in Queensland, and we are upset.
What marvels might this animal have
brought us
— A terrapin that Darwin one day met!
I’d first establish whether ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’,
And simply let the dialogue begin,
Like being introduced to Eve or Adam,
To chat about the origins of sin …
But Harriet is gone — I wish I’d met her:
That generations-spanning missing link,
Though dumb and slow, might show a little better
The origins of what makes thinkers think.
Bernadette Evans
In the long run, it was a useful life:
No wingèd chariot at her stoic back;
No hungry generations trod her down,
Not blond Achilles on the running-track.
To sex largely indifferent, she taught us
The true original of all our sins:
That man, for all his noble qualities,
Still bears the stamp of lowly origins.
In the long run, despite our vanities,
Our pride of lineage, or of ancient birth,
The carapace becomes a catafalque:
God speed! Lie heavy on her, gentle earth.
Her rheumy eye saw to the heart of things —
What both the ancients and the moderns said:
The race is very seldom to the swift,
And in the long run we shall all be dead.
Martin Woodhead
Harriet, you were so very old
You must have grown very wise.
When you raised you head to survey the
world
What lurked in those rheumy eyes?
Was it scorn for men and their strange
mistakes?
You were never about to tell
As you paced yourself and carried around
Your twenty-odd stone of shell.
Life after death may be still in doubt,
But we hope it may be so;
Perhaps in some heaven you will meet
Darwin, and let him know
Your species adapted so perfectly
That your survival span
Proved giant tortoises fitter for
This world than the wisest man.
G. McIlraith
No. 2455: A swarm of bees
You are invited to supply a piece of plausible prose containing the following words in any order: Benidorm, biscuit, belatedly, buff, beckoned, bosom, banjaxed, barrister, blue, bastard, baloney, bank. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2455’ by 3 August.
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