"The Gentle Water Bird" (1926) is a poem by Australian poet John Shaw Neilson.

[1] It was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 10 April 1926,[2] as by "Shaw Neilson", and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.

[1] The poem details how the poet sees God in his study of a crane landing on water.

In his biography of Shaw Neilson for The Advocate Bernard O'Brien wrote: "His family was Scottish and Presbyterian, and his mother had a touch of melancholy which made his early religious training very severe.

But an interesting poem, "The Gentle Water Bird," tells how he arrived at a truer idea of religion and of God.