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.
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.




The imagination hits just right, Damian. Thank you for the photos. The blue is brighter and deeper than I had pictured in my mind.
The beauty of your poems lies in the stories behind them
✨❤️