Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · Uncategorized Runner-up, Nakata Brophy Prize: revolve Susie Anderson I first noticed it in England, or perhaps it finally found me. I had assumed all this time I was being watched and here was proof. Clear halo in deep navy, shining iris nightly, no stars. Second time the orientation was more natural, immense. I walked to sky’s edge where town stops. Lay underneath stars low and heavy enough to reach. The bright wanting more. All moon all the time, the third time. Celestial ceremony captured in ochre. Made it not one but two, three, four eyes that follow, even by day. That old one walked the earth before there was moon. Held a torch and created the day, never made it back to her son. What will we do if we lose that fire. Finally we learned how it worked. Did we move or did the moon. Or was it both. Anyway we drove towards it that night. It was super, and the next one will be blue. Read the rest of Overland 231 If you appreciate Overland’s support of new writers, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Susie Anderson Susie Anderson uses words to reconnect with culture. A Wergaia woman from Western Victoria, her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Lifted Brow, Rabbit Poetry, un magazine, Artlink Australia and she was part of the anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. Recently, Susie was a writer-in-residence at Overland. More by Susie Anderson › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
