In a new poem Clive James has written of his "lungs of dust" – the illness that will take his life – and of his longing for the "glowing colours" of the Pacific sky that he can never see in life again.

This Saturday James, 74, is due to take the stage at an Australian literature festival in London, a rare public appearance given his advanced stage of terminal leukemia and emphysema.

He will reflect for an hour on his life in writing and words, in a new one-man show.

Despite his health the broadcaster and author has seemed to speed up his work in recent years, with poems published in the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman in the last month, as well as a monumental translation of Dante's Divine Comedy coming out last year.