The Long Week-end [poem by John Shaw Neilson]

[Editor: This poem by John Shaw Neilson was published in Beauty Imposes: Some Recent Verse (1938).]

The Long Week-end

Beauty she fought for, she had need to spend;
The foreman that she feared in all her woes
Leaves not a cloud. How fortunate she goes
Upon the long week-end!

Can we forgive her that she did not mend
Her faulty finery, her silken hose:
Thirst and a dream she had, and now she goes
Upon the long week-end.

Toil without pity, greeds without a shame —
These did she suffer — Sunday still a sigh,
And with the Monday morning on the sky
The unholy whistle came.

Sweet in the white, they say, she may ascend
To an unstinted country where the days
Come without malice. There she stays and stays
Upon the long week-end.

Source:
Shaw Neilson, Beauty Imposes: Some Recent Verse, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1938, page 22