Published in Overland Issue 235 Winter 2019 · Uncategorized The waiting Ouyang Yu In a play, someone living is pretending to be someone dead Someone dead comes alive in another name That’s one way to look at history Or to make it Track changes, all marked up Change without a trace That’s another way to look at history Or to correct it Things are born in the wrong They wait to be put right The waiting is called history The waiting is long Image: Jonathan Adeline on Unsplash Read the rest of Overland 235 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Ouyang Yu Ouyang Yu is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, won the 2004 South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. His third novel, The English Class, won the 2011 NSW Premier’s Award, and his fourteenth collection of poetry, Terminally Poetic (2020), won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards. He was shortlisted for the Writer’s Prize in the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature and he won the Fellowship from Creative Australia in 2021. His ninth novel, The Sun at Eight or Nine, was published in March 2025. More by Ouyang Yu › 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 30 April 2026 · Housing Organised abandonment and Victoria’s Big Housing Build Oli Caruana-Brown and Ella McNicol The crisis is not due to a physical shortage of properties. Rather, it is a series of intentional decisions by Governments to prioritise a system of private property over peoples’ basic human need for shelter, allowing landlords and corporations to continue to hoard housing and extract wealth from tenants via rent. 29 April 202629 April 2026 · literary culture “You are here”: a conversation about poetry and politics with Jeanine Leane Lyndall Thomas Jeanine won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her collection of poetry, gawimarra gathering. My conversation with her was recorded on Bunurong Country and in Naarm, in the east Kulin nations.
