Before the flashback, but after all the bad things happened, the author talks about “Gray smoke…” and gray is an archetype for lifelessness. She also talks about “…red earth…”and red is the archetype for violence and danger, bad things, generally. In the flashback part of the poem, the author uses five more colors. One of the colors used during the flashback was black. Black is generally associated with death and deep feelings of despair. The author says “…in your black uniform…” and her brother died in the Vietnam War, so the black could be the war uniform that he was buried in. The last color to be talked about is yellow. In the poem the author says “… the troops returning, the familiar yellow grass.” Yellow means enlightenment. Maybe the author was finally enlightened and realized that this is her home land because the last line in the poem says “I step onto the land, truly my land at last.”
The author uses a flashback in her poem to create a sense of time, to slow down the pace and make us think . Almost to show how time has just flown by and it feels like no time at all has passed when in all actuality it has been way longer. The theme of the poem is