Birnberg Preserve August 30, 2016

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Laurelwood August 28, 2016

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Harriman modified hike 18 August 27, 2016

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Reds

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.