Color Was Electricity

Color was electricity, it turned you blind
with images, red and blue states spreading across maps,
and the hope for change, yes, we can, filling television screens
like the concept of optimism when it entered human history.

For a boy in love with war games, globes
slipped through fingers that night, the Mac not back at all,
or if he was, it was back to the Senate, maverick instead of candidate.
But envy is always an error, and to win a prize or an award

or an election is not the reason we enter these races,
or so we'd like to think, when we think about such things
instead of what's for dinner or how we're going to pay for it
or rent or this month's supply of prescription medications.

Yes, we can, or at least we thought we had the power
to see a country become a better vision of itself, riding
an electric blue wave that crested the Appalachians that night
and washed a floodplain of hope across the nation.

(With apologies and thanks for the italicized lines to Meghan O'Rourke, Kenneth Koch, Sherod Santos, and David Lehman, respectively.)