Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013 Uncategorized This Robert Verdon garden has a history like the great white-capped wall built across the horizon seen from the Snowy Mountains Highway before Nimmitabel in early spring which comes up with the onions planted in memory one millennium they will be dug in, back into the magma … the hot garden under the frame watching the worms escape a lazy child, just watching stretching, fetching things begrudgingly and bored but disinclined to work, or play just watching, dreaming being a pod of dolphins diving across the waves like waves while the garden grows and I am old snow falling deeper every day life rushes like a tabla words curl like worms in the sun my frame of plastic broken by the cats and my one cactus left run wild and this … Robert Verdon Robert Verdon is a Canberra-based writer of poetry and prose. He came second in the 2012 WB Yeats Poetry Prize. More by Robert Verdon 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 6 February 20236 February 2023 Aboriginal Australia Winaga-li Gunimaa Gali: listen, hear, think, understand from our sacred Mother Earth and our Water Winaga-li Gunimaa Gali Collective To winaga-li, Gomeroi/Kamilaroi people must be able to access Gunimaa. They must be able to connect and re-connect. Over 160 years of colonisation has privileged intensive agriculture, grazing and heavily extractive water management regimes, enabled by imposed property regimes and governance systems. Gunimaa and Gali still experience the violent repercussions of these processes, including current climate changes which are exacerbating impacts, as droughts become longer, floods and heat extremes become more intense, and climatic zones shift, impacting on species’ viability and biodiversity. 2 First published in Overland Issue 228 3 February 20233 February 2023 Fiction Fiction | Romeo and Juliet II: Haunted rentals Georgia Symons The hauntings are actually quite flamboyant here, though. Yeah, come in, come in. Not like my friend Moya’s house—it just has a tool shed that sometimes isn’t there and that’s it. So boring. Yes, you can keep your shoes on.
