Red, White, and Blue - November 3, 2020

Christopher L. Morrow 

November 3, 2020

Texas may turn purple, they say.

But I’m not sure what that means.

Gone are the elephants and the donkeys

Now we’re just red or blue—

Hues defining collections of you’s—

Mixing to purple where we’re obscure.

Any second grader can tell you

“Purple comes from red and blue”

As they swirl their fingers through thickened paint

Or squeeze play-doh through their tiny fists.

As if mixing us would be that easy.

When touch screens are tapped

By pundits in gray,

It will be red or blue, not purple, they make.

Purple, a color of blend but also of bruise.

An aged wound, to the touch still tender;

Mixed not of ideas but of old blood and new

In that liminal space between healed and hurt.

My ballot is white; like a flag of surrender—

The unclaimed remnant of the American trinity,

The forgotten line between red and blue.

We will feed our ballots into the machine

Not in surrender but in hope and defiance,

Seeking to heal but destined to wound.

Waking tomorrow battered and bruised — purple after all.

Christopher L. Morrow is professor and department head of English and Languages at Tarleton State University.  A Shakespearean by training, his critical works have appeared in venues such as Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America; his first creative nonfiction essay appeared in Under the Gum Tree in 2017.