Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018 · Uncategorized Guarded by birds | Judith Wright Poetry Prize, first place Evelyn Araluen When you go as the spaces between wine&zoloft say you must at thirtyseven or some other too soon before old has a chance to grow in you before youth has time to loose you from his claws I will meet you at the edges of a body shaped like loss and trace the outline of your absence with smoke then take from the air the name of a man who smelt like river and spoke like distance Second surviving son to two generations of fathers to buried boys loved&beloved in your loudest lonely by the daughter to what I swear I heard you call deliverance too goodtoo good this eloquent offering of birdcage to gulls There are knowings I cannot tell you and things you do not know how to say between tradition and trauma there are nights when we meet voiceless in the shadow of oncewas gum the memory of leaf and branch the place where you want to die I know little of this ceremony have only collected for the coolamon carved from river red to carry water to carry child to carry smoke to carry you to those who watch and hope there will be place for you When you go I will be the one to tell the birds they will wait as I gather the eucalypt and tell me take them still living break the branch if you must Read the rest of Overland 230 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Evelyn Araluen Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her Stella-prize winning poetry collection DROPBEAR was published by UQP in 2021. More by Evelyn Araluen › 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 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction. 15 April 202615 April 2026 · Climate politics The $67 billion climate betrayal: how Australia’s record fossil fuel subsidies fund global destruction Noa Wynn The contradictions aren't failures of implementation. They're the predictable result of a political system that has decided fossil fuel profits matter more than climate stability, more than the Great Barrier Reef, more than Pacific Islander lives, and more than the future habitability of the planet.
