A walk, a bench and a row of lights: Elisabeta's "Old lightning" gets by on very little furniture. A speaker strolls down a road, sits on a rusty bench and realises that the place has stayed exactly as it was while they themselves have not. Nothing dramatic happens. The drama sits in the gap between what the street still is and what the walker has become. The central idea is that a place can stay unchanged and, by staying so, show us exactly how much we have changed.
The poem's hinge is a single line standing alone as its own stanza: "Just like I used to be before." The road has just been described as "so shiny, / so full of lights," so the line first reads as a compliment, as if the younger self and the road shared one glow. But "used to be" gives the game away. The glow belongs to the past. When the last stanza insists that "the lights on the road" have not changed at all, the logic closes like a trap. The road kept its shine, so the speaker is the one who lost theirs. A comparison that looked cheerful turns out to be a loss.
Structurally the poem is free verse, in stanzas of four, one, three, three and four lines, with no fixed metre. The lines are short and plain, close to thinking aloud. "Step by step" has the beat of footfalls, and the sentence that follows drifts along until the speaker finally "sat." The ellipsis after "Differently from before..." is a pause, a look at something before moving on. There is also a small oddity of tense. "Now It was just me" describes the present moment in the past tense, as if the speaker were already remembering the bench while sitting on it. In the last stanza the lines lengthen, and "were the irreplaceable memories from us on the way" is the longest line in the poem, as though memory finally has room to spread.
There is no rhyme scheme, but there are echoes. "Before" closes the second and third stanzas, and "sore" answers it across a gap as a true rhyme. The ending is the neatest echo. "Way" rhymes with "day," and that last "day" loops back to the very first line, "I was walking one day." The poem begins with one particular day and ends on "every day," so a single walk opens onto a whole shared past.
Light is the dominant image: "shiny," "lights," "lighted," and the title's "lightning." Lightning is sudden and brief, while lighting is steady illumination. The poem's own vocabulary leans toward the steady kind ("getting lighted by each other every day"), but the title may also hint at something flashing and intense that is now over. Against all this brightness stands the "rusty bench," the one dull, worn object. Rust is time made visible, yet the bench is also what has not changed, so it becomes a kind of anchor. "Old" appears twice, in the title and in "that old feeling," as if age were something that dims what was once bright.
The pronouns carry a quiet surprise. For four stanzas it is all "I" and "me," and the speaker is "just me." Only in the final stanza do "us" and "each other" appear, and the poem never says who this other person is, whether a partner, friend or someone else. Keeping them offstage until the memories are named makes their absence felt. "Without that old feeling / of getting sore" is also open. It could mean the hurt has faded, or that the speaker has lost some of their old sensitivity. Either way, the speaker seems calmer and perhaps emptier.
The poem's significance lies in this ambivalence. The unchanged bench and lights are comforting, but they are also what make the change visible. The memories are both the light that has gone and the only light left, and that is what "old lightning" seems to name. The poem is sometimes vague, since "different memorable things" never says what they were, but that vagueness leaves room for readers to fill in their own road and their own bench. The plain, slightly unpolished English also gives it an honest, unguarded tone.