A kiss that reads sorrow rather than wiping it away: that is where Alisha S.'s "Light" begins. The speaker asks the beloved to "kiss away my tears," then adds a more intimate request: "trace the patterns of my sorrow with your lips." Sadness is not erased here but studied, as if it were a map. The rest of the poem grows from that gentleness. It is a love poem, but also a poem about change. The speaker wants to be taught how to live in the present ("not look to the future / but live it"), and the beloved is the one who can teach it. By the end, two separate people have become a single, living whole.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm, and the lines swing between long, breathy ones ("trace the patterns of my sorrow with your lips") and tiny ones ("we are alive"). The lowercase "i" and the thin punctuation make it sound like something said quietly rather than written for display. The first half is built almost entirely from imperatives: *kiss, trace, mix, bring, help, make*. The speaker is asking. Then the grammar turns to the future tense. "i will follow you," "you will be my main direction," "there will never be a dawn." The only pause marking the shift is a comma after "follow you," but it changes the poem from plea to vow.
Two lines use the same trick. "Not look to the future / but live it" and "make perfection not a sin / but a goal" both hinge on a line break, so the reader feels the reversal as the eye drops to the next line and meets "but." The second pair is especially revealing. Calling perfection a "sin" suggests, judging by the text, that the speaker has felt guilty for wanting too much of themselves. The beloved's role is to turn that guilt into something that can be aimed at.
The most puzzling lines are "light remains light / no matter what the colour is." They sound almost like a tautology, yet they make sense if light is imagined as something that holds every colour at once. Whatever shade the speaker's mood takes, including the blue of sorrow, the essential brightness stays the same. The next request, to "mix with my nature," then reads like blending paint or beams of light. The title does real work here: light is the poem's name for what two people can make together without losing themselves.
The image people will remember is "you are the wolf; / i am the moon." It is a clever reversal. In the familiar picture, the wolf looks up and howls at a distant moon, so we might expect the moon to be the one followed. Instead the moon says "i will follow you." The speaker is worshipped by the wolf in the usual image, yet chooses to be led. There is another layer if we remember that the moon shines only with borrowed light. A moon that follows a wolf is a light that has found its direction. The semicolon between the two halves holds them side by side, equal and linked.
Even the word "dawn" is turned around. Dawn normally signals hope, but here it is the threat: "there will never be a dawn that breaks / the spell surrounding us." The poem prefers the night, with its moon and "endless stars," because night is where the spell holds. This could be read as escapism, a wish to stay inside a perfect moment. But "spell" can also mean devotion, a bond that daylight cannot dissolve.
The pronouns tell the story quietly. The poem opens with "my tears," "my sorrow," "my nature," "me." Then "you" arrives, then "us," and the last two lines settle on "we." The phrase "we are but one" uses "but" differently from the earlier turns: it no longer contrasts two ideas, it means *only*, as if the two have been reduced to a single point. Then the final line repeats the structure, "we are alive," in the plainest words in the poem.
The poem's significance lies less in polish than in honesty. A few images sit slightly awkwardly together, and the abstract language ("perfection," "direction," "definition") is bold and unadorned. But the central idea comes through clearly. Love here is not a rescue from sadness. It is a way of keeping sadness, giving it a pattern, and still stepping into the present.