My color, the color red
So fraught with different meanings
If you know your cultural history
Unknown to me as a boy choosing my favorite.
My older brother claimed blue as his own
Not allowing any shared concurrence
Leaving me second choice
I picked the color of passion and anger.
When I was six my father asked us to guess
What color light would be best on ships
To see the instruments at night and not be seen
A wartime question he had investigated.
Of course my brother said blue and I said red
And I remember this because red was the correct answer
Though my brother’s blue light was the choice for that strange
room
Filled with radar screens watching the Eastern seaboard.
That was my father’s small part in the Cold War militarism
Figuring out how to delay operator hallucinations
When the red fingered blacklists were so very real
And nuclear test fallout rained down on us all.
My brother took in the threat so completely
I remember him arguing with me for hydrogen bombs first
strike
To attack the Soviet Union like he read in some magazine
That was so wrong, so unthinkable to me.
I questioned the line in my eighth grade social studies
Teaching us to reject communism as a form of totalitarianism
When I asked the teacher and the class what was the problem
From each according to their abilities, to each according to
their needs.
In those days the red menace of communism
Growled like a Russian bear dancing with a Chinese dragon
Liberated Cuba and Vietnam and parts of Africa
Creating their nightmare vision of falling dominoes.
The fall of the Soviet Union such a setback in the struggle
The red flag of the first worker’s revolution taken down
The anti-Imperialist struggle degenerated into jihadism
My color appropriated by the right wing to mean the opposite.
The red states the places with the most poverty
With the most virulent racism and homophobia
With laws designed to deny reproductive rights to women
What I see is the color of the blood of the oppressed.
This old man no longer has any one favorite color
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
The beautiful rainbow spectrum our eyes detect
The rainbow flag represents everyone joined together.
