Orange is never actually described in this poem. Samantha Harper doesn't tell us it is bright, warm or somewhere between red and yellow. She lines up things that are orange and lets us do the seeing. What emerges is less a portrait of a color than a scrapbook of an autumn and a family.
The poem is built on repetition. Six times a line opens with "It's the color of," like a list being added to as each new memory surfaces. There is no regular meter and no rhyme scheme, and the lines stretch and shrink as thought does. "Its the color of fire when you finally getting it going again" runs long and a little tangled, which suits the slow effort of coaxing a fire back to life. The word "finally" carries real relief. The title ends with what looks like a date, 10-5-21, and the "#1" suggests the first of a set. Together they give the poem the feel of a dated notebook entry, though that is an impression from the title, not a known fact.
The order of the images is carefully managed. The poem begins outdoors, with trees, leaves in the wind, a fire and pumpkins, then moves indoors and into the family. The pumpkin couplet is where the senses cross: the color is something we see, yet what it brings back is "the scent." Orange here triggers memory through the nose as much as the eye, which is how memory often works.
The itchy sweater is the funniest moment, and an important one. "Something that i refuse to where" admits that not everything orange is lovable. A poem made only of cozy images might ring false, and this one gives the speaker a stubborn, teasing personality. The informal spelling and loose punctuation throughout fit that voice, which sounds spoken, not polished.
The emotional center is the pair of family images. "My mom's old car" is a vehicle in both senses, carrying the family and the memories. "That thing took us everywhere!" is the poem's only exclamation mark, and it reads like something said aloud with a laugh. The past tense hints, though it doesn't say, that the car belongs to earlier years. Then comes the father's flower: "Mums in the fall never fail as a gift to shower on him." "Never fail" suggests a tradition that has proved itself, and "shower" makes the giving generous. Mother and father each get an object, and neither is explained. The poem trusts the details to carry the feeling.
After these specifics the poem steps back and names what it has been doing: orange "brings forth so many emotions at once." The next lines look in two directions, toward "fun memories from the past" and toward "the desire to make new ones." This is the poem's central idea. Orange isn't only nostalgia. It is a color that links what has happened to what might.
The closing three lines widen the view to the sunset, "giving off it's one last show for the day." Calling the sunset a show makes the sky a stage and the speaker an appreciative audience. It also gives the poem its only clear rhyme, "day" and "way," which settles like a final chord after all the unrhymed lines. Looking back, many of the orange things are endings or turning points: leaves before winter, a fire being restarted, the end of daylight. Yet the mood is "comforting," not sad. The poem suggests that an ending feels gentle when you are surrounded by good memories and the promise of more.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. It uses plain words, ordinary objects and one sensory idea, and by the end orange has come to stand for the speaker's whole sense of home. It shows that a poem doesn't need elaborate language to be moving. It needs specific things, such as a worn-out car or a bunch of mums, and the honesty to say why they matter.