Stranger Conversations: Start the first line of your poem with a word or phrase from a recent passing conversation between you and someone you don’t know.
“We only deliver what others order,”
the man said, balancing warm boxes
as if they were brief, edible promises.
The woman beside me🧓🏻silver-haired, sure-voiced🗣️
shook her head with a smile
and told me her mother’s rule:
Never bring food unless you have enough
for every soul in the room.
So we laughed together, two strangers
waiting for our names to be called.
Outside, the world went on
without noticing us👀
Revere with its salt-worn boardwalk,
Brookline with its long walk home🚶♀️
but in that small waiting room
our stories met like tides.
She asked where I lived,
as if charting a map between us,
and I told her: thirty minutes on foot,
a comfortable distance from the familiar.
She said Revere, and suddenly
I could see the sand castles again🏰
the ones I used to take my children to,
their hands small in mine,
their futures sprawling, unbuilt.
Now they are grown,
sculptors of their own days.
She nodded, said she loved the sand castles too🏰
their brief beauty, their careful work washed clean
and begun again each year.
And in that moment
I understood the quiet grace
of a stranger’s conversation:
how it can settle beside you
like a warm offered slice,
enough to share,
enough to carry you
until the next name is called.
The Writings of Felina Silver 
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