Blue Glass

A poem from Poverty Flat

I often walk through the old goldfields on the edge of my town.
Quartz rocks still show where the borders of gardens once grew that are no longer there.
Sometimes, without looking for it, I find pieces of blue glass in the dirt.

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Blue Glass

Bright in her eyes,
the world rushing in
as she holds her child
in the doorway’s shade,
waiting for a doctor
out in the wasteland
of heavy holes
rank with mosquitoes.

Out past the quartz border
of her last garden
where geraniums, blood-red,
hold death at bay.

Now, a century late,
when I walk through these fragments
I find them when I’m not looking—
pieces of glass,

cracked in my hand,
sharp-edged,
cyanide blue
from a bottle
smashed in the quartz border
of her last garden.

Yet sunlight
still caught
in the blue glass.

These fragments are from the edge of the goldfield at Forest Creek where thousands of people would have been camping, living in timber slab huts, building houses. Many young families also braved the awful conditions and many hundreds of children died from disease in the area. There is children’s cemetery on the hill above Poverty Flat. They chose the area because it seemed to be free of gold.

I think about the hands that once held the medicine bottle whole.
About how objects outlast us.
About how sunlight can still be inside something broken.