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      Out into the mist,
Alone in the shadows that darken the vale,
With no heed the heart voice too broken to wail,
      The lips that I kissed!

      How cold and how still
The round baby limbs and the cheeks and the brow!
Is this waxen image all left to me now
      To fondle at will?

      Two years thou wert mine,
To scold and to clasp and to rock in my arms ---
Those sweet curling fingers, those rose-tinted palms,
      Those dimples of thine.

      No one was so near
As the mother who loved thee, yet dreaded to love,
Lest God should grow jealous, and bend from above,
      And find thee as dear.

      It was all in vain ---
The fates that I cheated, the prayers that I prayed.
Thou hast strayed in the darkness, mine own little maid,
      And I find not again.

First published in The Queenslander, 17 July 1897

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also.

The night, the rain, who could forget? --
The grey streets glimmering in the wet:
Wreckers and ruined wreckage met:
   There was no dearth
Of all the unlovely things that yet
   Must plague the earth.

Gloom, and the street's unhallowed joys:
The sly-eyed girls, the jeering boys:
Faint-carolling amid the noise
   A woman worn --
A broken life: a heart, a voice,
   Trembling and torn.

She did not sing of hillside steep,
Of reapers stooping low to reap;
No love-lorn shepherd with his sheep
   Made moan or call:
A mother kissed her child asleep,
   And that was all.

Slowly into our hearts there crept
I know not what: it flamed! it leapt!
Was it God's love that in us slept?
   I saw the mark
Of tears upon her, as she stept
   Into the dark.

First published in The Bookfellow, 4 April 1907, and again in the same magazine August 1914;
and later in
Poems by John Shaw Neilson, 1964;
Australian Letters, 4 September 1964;
The Vital Decade: Ten Years of Australian Art and Letters edited by Geoffrey Dutton, 1968;
Green Days and Cherries: the early verses of Shaw Neilson edited by Hugh Anderson and Leslie James Blake, 1981;
The Collins Book of Australian Poetry compiled by Rodney Hall, 1981;
John Shaw Neilson: Poetry, Autobiography and Correspondence edited by Cliff Hanna, 1991; and
Selected Poems edited by Robert Gray, 1993.

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Poetry Library

See also.