Garret Kaoru Hongo's "Yellow Light" portrays life inside a Los Angeles neighborhood. "The Barrio" within the poem is used as a representation of minority communities in the United States. Hongo utilizes rich imagery, local vernacular, and lyrical devices to present a scene of struggles for people in a neighborhood, uncoincidentally similar to the one where he grew up.

Food is a central symbol throughout the poem. The woman carries a bag of dinner ingredients gathered from specialty grocery stores around the city. The care required to collect each specific item from each place highlights food's importance in the woman's culture. This is emphasized against the backdrop of the normalcy of her daily commute back to her apartment doorstep. Even after a long day, the woman finds gathering the perfect ingredients for dinner important.

On her walk, the woman notices children of different races playing in segregated groups. These small scenes of partitions represent larger issues of segregation in the United States. As much as America portrays itself as a melting pot, it is more like the bag of groceries the woman carries home for dinner, where people of different ethnic backgrounds remain isolated rather than integrated.

The poem uses consistent alliteration, consonance, and sibilance to read like a song sung from the barrio. Hongo employs local slang throughout the poem to show his familiarity with the subject matter. The poem illustrates how, even within Los Angeles's multiculturalism, Hongo perceives minorities in a constant struggle to be seen and heard.

The overpowering fluorescent lights from businesses vanquishing the dim glow from kitchen windows represents how oppression darkens the metaphorical light of the oppressed. However, as much as images of distress represent strife, Hongo offers images from springtime to offer a glimpse of optimism.

The woman daydreams about blooming flowers during springtime to remove herself temporarily from the intense, overwhelming heat of October. In this daydream, Hongo uses the personification of the Wisteria flowers "shaking out the long tresses of its purple hair" to show how humans, like flowers, can grow and flourish in the right conditions. The image of "monkey flowers / tangled in chain-link fences by the trash" symbolizes the idea that minorities have to fight to survive in harsh conditions. Her daydreams are literally about the seasons, but metaphorically, they address Hongo's hope for a better way of life for minorities.

The vivid imagery in the last stanza finishes the poem on a somber note. It is no longer the artificial incandescence of fluorescent lights that illuminates the scene but instead the light of the moon, which "covers everything, everything in sight." This yellow light alludes to the woman's Asian American heritage. It represents the lens through which she sees the world as a segregated minority instead of an individual. Although there is light in the end, it is a light that, like the poem, illuminates issues rather than progress.

Despite adversity, the woman carries on with her daily life and copes with the challenges of being an Asian American in the United States. The main theme of the poem is endurance in the face of struggle. Despite experiencing oppression, she holds onto her cultural heritage and finds hope for a brighter future as she reflects on the blooming flowers in late spring.