A man climbs over a cemetery wall in search of a good shot and ends up as the one being framed. That reversal drives Balachandran V's "Compositions of the Dead," and the poem is clever in how long it lets us believe we are only reading a description.
The opening is a critic's verdict, not a mourner's: "The cemetery was rather / Asymmetrical." The polite "rather" sounds almost fussy, and the long, awkward word is stranded on a line of its own, as lopsided on the page as the graves it describes. The speaker looks at the dead as a design problem. What follows is an inventory in which "Some" keeps returning, like a lens panning across the scene: "Some tombs, sarcophaguses / Some graves marble laid / Shining black." The spelled-out "C-R-O-S-S" is the most telling detail. Broken into hyphenated letters, the word loses its religious weight and becomes a shape, one more surface to photograph. Even grief has gone stale here, since the wreaths and bouquets are "withered." The only thing described as sleeping is the mist, and that small personification quietly prepares us for the waking to come.
The form supports this slow build. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat, so nothing signals a turn. Lines are short and often unpunctuated, and they move in small steps, like someone picking his way between plots. The speaker's purpose is stated plainly: "Looking for an angle / A frame to compose." "Compose" is the pivotal word. It means arranging a picture, but it also means calming oneself. By the end the dead are the composed ones and the speaker is not. The title's "Compositions" plays on both senses.
The turn comes with a dash and a line break: "And saw- / My face." The sentence stops mid-step, the way a shutter hesitates, and the two-word line lands alone. The stone is "plain blank," and earlier we were told some marble was polished "Shining black." So the face may simply be a reflection. But a blank headstone is also waiting for a name, and the poem lets the image work both ways, as mirror and as prediction. A lens is a kind of mirror too, so the photographer finds himself on the wrong side of his own equipment.
Then the dead rise, and the poem becomes darkly funny. "Legs crossed, arms crossed / They posed." Crossed arms suggest a corpse laid out, but they also suggest a family group shuffling into position for a portrait. The repeated "crossed" freezes the image, and the verb "posed" gives the dead a cooperative, almost professional politeness. They are ideal subjects, better behaved than any living model. Yet the speaker's only stated emotion, "Shocked," gets a single word, and the poem moves on. That restraint keeps the tone deadpan, which makes the scene feel more chilling than a louder description would.
The last two lines complete the reversal. The gravediggers appear without introduction and simply wait, patient tradesmen who know the work will arrive. They wait "For my final click," and the phrase has at least two meanings. It could be the last photograph he will take, or the sound of his own ending, the shutter closing like a lid. The poem does not say which, and the ambiguity is the point. His camera was a way of standing outside the picture, and the final line removes that distance.
The poem is worth reading because it gives an old idea, that death comes for the observer too, a modern shape. Photography freezes a moment and holds it, which makes it a small rehearsal of mortality. The speaker treats a graveyard as material, slipping over the wall and hunting for angles among people who can no longer object. The poem's quiet answer is that the frame can close in the other direction. It makes the point without sermonising, using a flat inventory, an abrupt dash, and a group of patient men with spades.