What Colour is Nine?

Philip Rösel Baker

Kira (her name means beam of light
if you go by the Sanskrit derivation
or dark-haired, in the Irish language
if you lean more towards the Celtic persuasion)
has hair which is indisputably fair.
But then, names are chosen as much for their ring
and associations, which have little to do
with the objective facts of things.

Kira has always seen numbers in colour
(five is yellow, three is green)
and she’s surprised when I say that in any light
I only see numbers in black and white.

On a cloudless evening, we stand
looking up at the high domed ceiling
we’ve invented the label sky to describe.
Across the arc of it, particles scatter 
short-wave blue and violet light.
The latter scatters more quickly - by rights
some say we should see a violet sky.
But our eyes perceive violet 
less easily than blue, so 
how much does that have to do
with the objective facts of things?
What colour is the sky? 
And is Kira’s blue a little more violet 
than mine? And what about ultra-violet light
that our eyes are simply not designed 
to see? Many birds can see it.
Their sky is not Kira’s, or mine.

I ask Kira - what colour is nine?

The next day, at four, with a silent roar
the sun is falling towards the tree-line, 
shaking its hoar-hinted late autumn mane,
turning smoky grey clouds to stained glass 
windows, aiming ruby lasers to ignite the leaves 
on my drowsy cherry to a blaze of crimson.
Their tangerine veins sing a silent refrain
mourning the death-bed of summer.  
Between cloud sand-banks, rimmed
with dying embers, a liquid lagoon 
of pure turquoise sky sighs and remembers, 
stretching in places to lime-green shallows,
lapped by wavelets of time.

Arles revealed six or seven different reds 
and a similar number of pale to dark greens
(so van Gogh wrote to his sister).
- This is what Vincent must have seen.
Surprised to hear my own voice, I stand, 
as if to kneel would be the only alternative,
caught in a moment I had not planned for,
rooted to the spot, on the borderline 
between art and life - waylaid by wonder.

I ask Kira - what colour is nine?

On a planet 
many dimensions away 
in elliptical orbit around a star
where plants in daylight absorb
most colours of the spectrum
reflecting reds and purples back, 
and very occasionally blue, the sky
is normally shades of what our eyes 
would see as green. From what she 
would not call a hill, a being 
is staring, amazed by the star-set, 
flaring the sky into short-lived pools 
of pure cobalt blue - at least, that’s how 
her brain perceives it - as if two pulse-beats
delay for a moment. The red beat waits 
and so does the tan, for the rare 
precious blue to fade. Surprised 
to hear her own voice, she stands,
as if kneeling would be the only alternative,
caught in a moment she had not planned for,
rooted to the spot, on the borderline 
between art and life - waylaid by wonder.

I ask Kira - what colour is nine?

The Science

An object appears coloured to us because of the way it interacts with light. When light shines on an object, some colours are reflected off it and others are absorbed by it. A black object absorbs all colours equally and reflects none, so it looks black to us. Our perception of colour is also affected by the physical limitations of the human eye and by neurological effects such as the way the brain processes visual information. Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). Vincent van Gogh wrote that when he was learning piano as a child, he saw a different colour with every note he played. There are many different kinds of synaesthesia - one of the most common is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, where letters or numbers are associated with specific colours. As far as we know, white light has the same physical properties in all parts of the visible universe, but the way it is scattered, absorbed and reflected will vary between planets, and the way it is perceived by other life-forms will depend in part on the physical characteristics of their eyes.

The Poet

Philip Rösel Baker is an Anglo-German poet living under dark night skies in a remote hamlet in East Anglia, UK. His poetry has been published in various newspapers, magazines and anthologies in the UK and US – most recently in On a Knife Edge, a climate change collection published jointly by Suffolk Poetry Society and the Lettering Arts Trust, and Water (Michigan State University Libraries Short Édition). In 2022 he was long listed for the International Erbacce Prize and he won the George Crabbe Poetry Prize in the UK. In 2023 he won a finalist award for the US Fischer Prize.

Next poem: White light might not exist by Skye Wilson