A Faint Light
There’s a very faint light in my room.
Everything else is pitch black.
It’s two a.m. and the light lies on my bed
It’s coming from the building opposite
I sit up and see, right at the edge of the light,
a person, sitting there. I look at him
and he must be looking at me, too.
It's not the reflection in my mirror
I smashed my mirror fourteen years ago
and since then, there's been no mirror in my room.
The room is quiet except for the whoosh of cars
and roaring of dump trucks in the distance.
He sits there, keeping me company,
slowly, slowly becoming abstract
while the light opens up into an empty space.
About the translators
Austin Woerner is a Creative Fellow in Chinese-English literary translation at the University of Leeds.
Zheng Wanqi is an MA student currently enrolled in the English Literature course at the School of English, University of Leeds.