“Light
By Ian Li

Light of My Life

I smile.
She waves.
A train cuts between us.
I become a beam of light, bouncing
off the top of the staircase to reach her platform.
She's still there. We grab coffee. She's a physicist.
Light is a particle, etching our each encounter on speckled film.
Glittering sunrises, flickering candlelight dinners, holiday lanterns.
Under dusky moonlight, she shares news with a gleam in her eye.
Not the glow of pregnancy - she landed a professorship abroad,
tenure track. We're different wavelengths. Light is a wave,
illuminating two paths, diffracting into many outcomes.
She's beside me, but she's also on the departing train.
She waves.
I smile.

Poems in Passage

Thank you to our valued partners
TTC • Aga Khan Museum; Pattison

Design & layout by Marissa Korda & Marta Ryczko

Picture of the Light Of My Life poem taken on the Toronto subway in May, 2026.