Most funeral poems look at the dead or the mourners. Balachandran V's "A Flag, Black" looks through the eyes of the object hanging over the gate. The flag is limp, head bowed, and entirely sure of its own importance. It calls itself "the herald, the proclaimer, / The silent trumpeter of death," and the poem's quiet comedy comes from watching that grand self-image meet the facts.
The title's comma gives a clue. "A Flag, Black" reads like a label or an item on a list, and the same phrasing returns twice more, in "'I', thought the flag, black" and in the closing "The flag, black." The first time, the flag is boasting. The last time, it is being described as rubbish.
The poem soaks the scene in black. Women in black sidle up the path, men pin "little pieces of black" to their shirtfronts, clouds are black, umbrellas black, shoes black, even the rain-washed tarmac "Glistened, in black." The repetition is deliberate. It builds the flag's argument that "Black is the colour of truth," and it makes the single break in the pattern land harder: the ambulance, seen "Beyond the black umbrella bubbles," is white. That phrase, with umbrellas as bubbles, shows the world from the flag's height, as a drifting surface of dark circles.
Colour is also where the flag's vanity shows. It envies red, the colour of the chairs "lined up / Waiting politely for the old," and of the master's silk and flowers. "Why couldn't I been red?" it asks, as if it were at a party and had been given the wrong costume. Those chairs are a grim joke too, since the old are "Awaiting their turn," as if at a doctor's surgery. The flag treats the living the same way. It has "an eye for the soon-to-be-dead" and sees death in "their glassy eyes," then thinks, "This one would soon need me." The word "smug" gives away the narrator's view of this. The flag is not mourning so much as touting for business.
The human details undercut the grand talk about truth. Men comb their "Black-dyed hair furtively," trying to hide age while dressed for a funeral. The women's kohl runs down their cheeks, so grief is shown as something messy that smears makeup. The flag says it will "Rejoice with my kindred," and the word is chilling in this setting. Its comfort in death is really pride in belonging to the occasion.
The form suits this tone. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, speech-like lines in free verse. Sentences break across lines ("as / Women in black sidled up the path") and the flag's thoughts sit in single quotation marks inside the narration. The effect is dry and observational, like a quiet aside. Small moments of voice, like the sighed "Ay" and the bracketed "(why black?)" at the very start, make the flag oddly human. That bracket is the poem's one moment of doubt, and the flag soon drowns it in certainty.
The ending reverses the poem's mood. The flag "readied itself" for "a long vigil, / Braving the sun and the rain," a picture of dutiful endurance. Then the last sentence cuts that off: "In a few days / Somebody will fling / The flag, black / Into the bin." The verb "fling" is casual and unceremonious, and the line breaks make the flag drop sharply, one short line after another. The symbol that claimed to speak for the ultimate truth is thrown away like anything else.
The poem's significance lies in that deflation. Without sneering at grief, it suggests that the objects and rituals we use to dignify death are as temporary as we are. The flag's pride mirrors the vanity of the mourners, and the master in his red silk is no more permanent than the flag. If death really is "the only truth," the poem implies, it is a truth that needs no flag to announce it, and that is probably why the flag ends up in the bin.