Revisionist Poetry – “Orange Man”, v.8 (a political elegy, or effigy, depending on how you see it…)

Orange man, orange man — where have you gone?
It came to pass, not to the glare of banners nor to the roaring place of crowds,
but into the rooms where sound unthreads itself into quiet,
into the slow, cool places where applause, like dust, lies down and sleeps;
and the lamps that once took your colour now burn without answer, and we keep vigil for no voice.

Orange man, orange man — what did you carry away?
You carried away a catalogue of promises, folded fine as paper money, stamped with vows that would not hold;
you left behind a house whose doors swing on the memory of your step, where laughter echoes and finds no foot to answer it,
and children measure the empty hours against the length of your shadow and learn how to name their hunger.

Orange man, orange man — who counts the cost?
We who remained count with small hands: the slow attrition of trust, the shuttered shopfronts whose windows remember the shine,
the ledger of favours balanced against the weight of all the ordinary days — bread and rent, the small economies of mercy — now found wanting.
We mark the calendar of months like wounds and bind them with names; we gather the loose coins of consolation and press them into palms that do not open.

Orange man, orange man — why do we call you still?
Because when a bright thing falls its light fragments and scatters: we pick up the shards to see the flaw, to learn the cut, to speak the truth aloud;
because naming is a kind of tending — the scripture of remembering — and we will read these lines at the bedside of what was broken,
that by the telling there might grow a sober seed of care, a law of gentleness to replace the pyres of boast.

Orange man, orange man — how shall we bury the noise?
Not with a trumpet but with a slow folding: banners rolled, the gilt turned inward, the rally-cry unlearned like a child unwilling —
we will lower the clamour into earth, inter the loud inventions beside small acts of repair; and we will sing a thinner hymn,
one that speaks of mornings and clean dishes and the return of ordinary hands, that names the cost and names the hope.

Orange man, orange man — what remains when the glare has dimmed?
A record, a list, a small circle of witnesses who keep the lamp trimmed and the book open;
we who were spared shall be the slow custodians of what was taken, learning, in the long quiet, how to hold one another’s bread, how to mend the seams of the day.
And though the noise keeps the taste of iron on our tongues, we will learn — by mourning and by work — the patient liturgy of repair.