For a Little Girl’s Birthday [poem by John Shaw Neilson]

[Editor: This poem by John Shaw Neilson was published in Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson (1934).]

For a Little Girl’s Birthday

Is there a beauty over pain,
Is there of music for a song,
Gentle as sunlight on the rain,
Gentle with crying all day long?

How should a singer of the cold
Seeing strange holiness in air
In his blue famine seek to hold
Vainly your paradise of hair?

Once in a wonderment I prayed:
— Earth is upon me tedious mild:
Hear me, O hapless God of Aid!
Throw me a heaven around a child.

Source:
John Shaw Neilson (editor: R. H. Croll), Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson, Melbourne: Lothian Publishing Company, 1934 [May 1949 reprint], page 88