For we are broken children after all, and we have to learn again how to play, all the beautiful animals and creatures of this tender and fierce maternal earth and the four cardinal directions and the four seasons teaching us how to stalk and prowl and hide and die as they do and how to spread our invisible wings through soaring words of praise even if our ink is faint or fading away, even if we are waiting for some spirit to come down from heaven and knock at the doors of our hearts, to open them so completely the whole crucified universe may enter, even if our ink is faint or made of humble tears that can wash all vanity and cruelty and fear away if only we would break down and let them flow—and this my only prayer for one whose soul is writ in water and flowing streams, may I grow wormholes until I become a human brook trout, caught and pierced through by the glorious agony of all creation, and so please teach me what every tree and flower knows but will not say, out of a great and abiding humility that bends at every dawn and dusk, teach me the ever-shifting wires of light on the horizon and the luminous mists of clouds—and even if our ink is faint, even if world wars and high speed traffic and global warming threaten all life on this heartbreaking planet, even if we have to borrow or make up ink with our own blood or leaf stains on the sidewalk, even if we have to write with smashed shards of glass or the drooping branch from a willow tree, even if our ink is faint, may the poem living inside each one of us somehow find its voice and the dear inner ear of someone close to hear, to lean into this sound for as long as it takes hope to travel to the deepest seas of our hearts, like a breath from another world, something good and something loving, something holistic and something limping through eternity, something magnanimous with arms open enough to hug the whole universe and something so small and gentle no metal detector or laser beam can register its presence, a summons, a prayer again, a last chance to say I love you, to say forgive me, though even if our ink is faint, even if the pens and print cartridges and the rivers run dry, may we sing the one poem we are given, even if our song is a whisper, a wail, a scream, even if our ink is faint.