Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015 · Uncategorized Night air Vanessa Kirkpatrick In memory of my grandmother The full moon washes the garden in light. Bare branches of elm, a tumble of ferns, each stone on the path from my mother’s house to the door of your own. In the notes of the mopoke’s song descending again and again, I fall through night air. Think of your hands, still warm, reaching across the bed as you close your eyes. High winds shunt the ragged clouds so it seems the moon is skating backwards. I want to keep holding the hand that held my own as a child. Loss is a pure tone released from the body. A note in the darkness descending again and again. Vanessa Kirkpatrick Vanessa Kirkpatrick lives in the Blue Mountains. Her first collection, To Catch the Light (2013), won the inaugural John Knight Memorial Poetry Manuscript Prize and was commended for the 2013 Anne Elder Award. More by Vanessa Kirkpatrick › 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 7 February 20257 February 2025 · Friday Fiction The gap between the trees Jenny Sinclair At first it was because I was angry. It might have looked like I was running away but I wasn’t. I was punching the earth with my feet. The faster I went — the harder my soles hit the ground — the better it felt. Because punching people is, you know, illegal. And wrong. But mostly illegal. 6 February 2025 · open letter Open Letter from Attendees of the National Anti-Racism Symposium at the Queensland University of Technology Delegates to the National Anti-Racism Symposium We urge QUT, politicians and others receiving pressure to not only resist these attacks on the intellectual freedom and academic integrity of the presenters, Carumba Institute and QUT, but, further, to condemn the racist, reactionary and divisive campaign that produced them. Anything less will be a capitulation to the most corrosively anti-intellectual forces in Australian society, which will ultimately harm not only Carumba and QUT, but all of us.
