A good innings

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.