As a poet I feel we have no business but to pray. But prayer is wild, and never contained by any religion. Prayer is necessary, because of hope, despair, loss, love, longing. One might pray to anything, or anyone, or nothing at all. Prayers are poems sent by the heart. They are addressed to someone absent, who is yet present, and in the longing one may speak true and beautiful words.

Prayers make us human, cast hopeless hopes out onto the ether, extend care and regret, whist and desire, reverie and affection upon the air, sent to objects of contemplation, of lost belonging, of broken bonds found strong beyond the breaking. Prayer is human, because the heart must speak its thoughts, and needs world as audience, even in a hidden grotto.

Trees, rocks, running rivers bear witness ; broad swathes of wind-swept sky bear witness ; gulls and sparrows, toads and bears bear witness, and what the earth has heard, her creatures pass on invisible, through unseen matrices of the heart that plasmatic crackle through the loam and on the wind.

Such is the conceit of the heart, its own special delusion, a delusion to which we are, by virtue of having soul, entitled. One never knows all the prayers on the air which reach one unknown, except if one reaches out and imagines them, and in imagining, receives them. We are foolish beings, and such folly is our right of pride.

The modern world has it wrong. We are not "talking to ourselves". We are talking to the wind, and what the wind hears, it does not forget. Let us not forget the prayers cast out onto the wind, for the Breath's Father, full wisdom working, wanders there unseen.

Hearts know.