Snowdrops
The Snowdrop Girl in fields of snowdrops walks,
Whiter than foam, deeper than waters flowing,
Flakes of wild milk gone blowing,
Snowing on cloudy stalks.
The Snowdrop Girl goes picking flowers of snow,
Blossoms of darkness bubbling into dreams,
In a strange country, by the shadowy streams
Where the cruel petals of the Coke-tree grow.
From the smoke and the fume of the backyard room,
Where poverty sits and gloats,
On runaway feet from a dirty street
To a field of snow she floats;
And tickets to Hell have a curious smell
And a dangerous crystal whiff,
Where men hawk Death in a snowdrops’s breath
At a couple of shillings a sniff.
Slessor’s light verse must be counted among the most impressive achievements in Australian poetry from the 1930s. He contributed a series of these slight, but perfectly-formed, poems to Smith's weekly where, accompanied by Virgil Reilly’s highly evocative and realistic illustrations, they opened a window onto inner-city Sydney during the early 1930s.
Image - Sydney Harbour Bridge during construction in 1930
Cocaine was the drug of choice then. Slessor writes about it in "Snowdrops",
