Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
The Lonely Child
The Lonely Child - Sarojini Naidu
The Lonely Child
Silver Star, O will you be my mother
Will you stay with me and kiss me in the black night when I cry?
Laughing wind, I want you for a brother
Will you play with me and tell me stories of the sea and sky?
Sometimes, O wind you know, I am so lonely
O star I am afraid of sounds and creeping shadows on the wall.
God, they say loves little children
Only I wish that he had made someone to love me and to hear me call.
Birds and bees and flowers have one another
The limpkin and the lark,
The grey mouse and the squirrel and the deer.
Does God forget how much I want a mother,
To hold me in the dark
And whisper lovely secrets in my ear.
The recordings were taken from the British Library Archive and stored on 10” shellac discs, Columbia LBE 51, recorded in 1931, UK. Recording used by kind permission of the British Library.