Waking

You have the colours of day. If once
a crash of light broke in past eyes
and shook the poor lies from our mind
of what we take for sight and sense,
and showed the blind the rainbow’s dance –
and turned to a fresh-knowing kind
our strained and vainly-thinking race,
and let us see the day’s new face
and lit our blindness with surprise –
I’d see light’s patchwork elements
both in sharp notes and quilten softness
pierce the day with bird’s-voice deftness –
and in some sort I’d understand
those sounds, those new sounds. I’d see clear
the evidence of something grand,
that far and near and up and down
on every side utters its charms . . .
so I sit here with sight restored
in certainty that near means near,
and see (of your new love assured)
the purple of your dressing-gown,
the milky smoothness of your arms.