Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 199
winter 2010
ISBN 978-0-9805346-6-5
published 31 May 2010

lyrebird

Ned Kelly as landscape – Sid Nolan’s idea
					Ned Kelly member of the family
Ned Kelly as bully
				           Ned Kelly softy
keeper of paycocks. Ned Kelly as ploughshare
		      Rosella can of condensed
Ned Kelly as the auld Surfers Paradise
	         of lagoons and shrikes
			Ned Kelly as a green Ribbon – twenty years in yr.
			      pocket
Ned Kelly as Red Kelly in drag
     If you believe Peter Carey
Ned Kelly as the October mow-
					       & old scotch foreskin jokes
	              Ned Kelly as lunatic fringe of desert spring, as Meaghan Morris
		Leaving Tenterfield in her teens, or Newcastle forever
Ned Kelly as bushel of Tasmanian heads
   Ned Kelly as a Mentone bookie in suede
       Fletcher Jones Jeans. Ned Kelly as Melton junkie. Ned Kelly as Bon Scott’s
Letters to Adelaide & sister
			Irene
Ned Kelly as a TV celebrity’
s dog wading the scum at St Kilda sniffing
       at the golden band of freeway
	     i’ th’ West
Ned Kelly as downtown Melbourne shamrockery
:conspiracy of clover, ‘trefoil’, or when you’re German
		  Dreiblattbogen
‘De Tird Oiye’ say Dubliners, meaning pagan punch
Ned Kelly as the night-jar, bone-jar
  little jar of bones we’d worship if
     we c’ld find it if
        we c’ld find it.

Duncan Hose is runner-up in the 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. He is a poet and postgraduate scholar, currently living in Melbourne.
© Duncan Hose
Overland 199-winter 2010, p. 48

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