Silver Fish

I rode the train

this morning,

squeezed between the yammering conversation

of two women and

the blur of landscape colors

rushing past the window.

Their native tongue

a key I earned

not long ago,

my own enigma code.

Still, I bob in the dark sea.

Then —

a silver fish

breaks the surface:

someone speaking

my other tongue.

I turn.

Not someone I know —

but a face shaped

by a long lost great-grandmother

we may have shared.

Two conversations,

two rivers flowing beside me.

Neither one

I belong to.

Yet both,

I understand.

So I dip my toes —

and write this poem

in the language

I always knew:

a home,

on land,

now ice cold.