Colour - John Blight

What need to paint a world for this keen man?
Who, blind now, knows its oceans in such words
As “sounding,” “leagues and leagues” and "seagulls”;

'Endurance' (1912) in the ice
Photographed  by James Francis Hurley
Royal Museums Greenwich

And who says: “We’ll come ashore this summer.
For a year we yawed through snapping ice;

And I grew blind.” Who saw the ice and said:
“The mongrel pack! Like yapping dogs, the floes
Rose up around us, froze and locked us in,
A year. A year! And it was months too late
To save my sight. Our fated vessel, crushed,
Plighted her troth in the sea’s arms under.
But, then, there came a ship. They cried, ‘A sail !’
They cried it on the day my total blindness
Set like a sun in tropic latitudes.
And, oh, their words were pricking stars of light.
In black and white they talked, eschewed the green
Of seas I'd known. Perhaps they, too, were blind!
I had my answer, when, at length, I smelt
Hot summer sunlight blowing out of Sydney,
And sensed my world, blue, gold, in calm reflection.”

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John Blight (1913 - 1995) Australia
Source: The Boomerang Book of Australian Poetry, chosen edited and arranged by Enid Moodie Heddle, Longmans, Green and Co., 1956